let’s discuss shared desk horror stories

by Alison Green on February 27, 2025

With more people being called back to offices where they’re expected to share crowded spaces with coworkers — including sharing desks — let’s talk about shared space horror stories! Maybe you share a desk with someone who pinned up deeply personal love notes from their partner all over your shared space … or set the screensaver on your shared computer to be photos of herself in a bikini … or maybe you had a boss who “was constantly leaving open the very explicit romance e-novels she was reading on the shared workstation so you’d sit down to start your shift and suddenly you’re reading about parts quivering and throbbing.”

Please share your tales of shared work space gone awry in the comments.

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  1. Amber Rose*

    Years and years ago I worked for a tiny company as a sort of admin. But the only computer and desk they had for me to use was the one the field crews used for stuff, so the first one or two hours of every shift was spent standing around watching them, and I had to be careful to never start anything I couldn’t quickly save and close in case they needed the computer later.

    I eventually moved to a different desk when someone left, and I thought the computer was finally just mine to use, only to immediately get yelled at for turning it off at the end of the day because it was apparently running some important system. Not that anyone told me.

    That company sucked.

    1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      I once worked at a TV station where my “desk” was a tiny sliver of space on a particle-board shelf, between the printers and the trash barrel. The assignment editor was pregnant, and would lean over to the trash barrel multiple times a day to vomit. Good times, good times.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        You are so strong – I mean that SO genuinely. That would last perhaps one day before I would walk

      2. LaminarFlow*

        Wait…WHAT?! Oh wow, I would not be ok with that. I don’t care about hearing/seeing someone barf, but smelling barf, especially on a consistent basis, is just not something I can do!

        1. lilsheba*

          Oh I care plenty. It’s been a trend lately that tv shows and movies insist on making you hear and see someone barfing, and I’m over it. We don’t need that.

          2. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

            I can’t deal with that either. I got up and walked out of the movie Pitch Perfect for this reason, even though I used to sing a cappella – and that was on screen! I’ve seen plenty of gross stuff in the office, but this would be a dealbreaker for me, no matter how bad I felt for the pregnant woman.

          4. Princess Sparklepony*

            I didn’t really notice eating noises until recently where ads are using them and calling it whatever they call it – ASMR? It just skeeves me out. And that’s just pouring coffee and sipping it. I never saw myself as sensitive to that but yeah, no thanks.

              1. Chas*

                Same, I love other types of ASMR (literally listening to some mic brushing right now), but even hearing people licking their lips or swallowing while talking can sometimes irritate me, let alone hearing people chew!

              2. mymotherwasahamster*

                I go through periodic spurts of watching the Great British Baking Show and two episodes into this one I’m concerned that the biting and chewing sounds might finally render it unwatchable for me (though I truly hope not). Does misophonia, like crotchetiness, worsen with age?

        2. WhoCares*

          Oh I care plenty. It’s been a trend lately that tv shows and movies insist on making you hear and see someone barfing, and I’m over it. We don’t need that.

        3. Rara Avis*

          I am a sympathetic vomiter. Which means if I see/smell it, I’m likely to do it too. Luckily my kid survived childhood with very few stomach bugs. But one year I had a student/advisee with undiagnosed Crohn’s disease, who spent a good part of the year throwing up in my trash can. It was good for both of us when the doctors figured out what she needed.

          1. mymotherwasahamster*

            I‘m sorry for what sounds like a very unpleasant set of facts, but the phrase „sympathetic vomiter“ does make you sound like a lovely person :)

        1. Armchair analyst*

          And for the pregnant lady! Everyone should be able to be sick in private, even if it’s not contagious.

          1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

            Yeah, I didn’t blame her — there were 26 women sharing one (1) ladies’ room in that building, and I’ve never been pregnant but I don’t imagine the digestive side effects are something that can wait.

            1. NotmyUsualName*

              I raced into a clothing store very visibly pregnant to ask for the rest room and was told it was for employees only. I said I was about to vomit. Employees only.

              I turned and made it halfway to the exit when I could not hold back. All over the floor and a display. I did not apologize. I just kept walking.

              2. ZK*

                Oof. That’s the only time I ever bent the “Employees Only.” Pregnant women got to use the restroom for any reason, but especially since their bladders are being pummeled by an alien.

                1. Sometimes there's a good reason*

                  I once worked in a bookstore in a *very* old building with insufficient storage space. There was a box of cash on top of the toilet in the employees-only restroom (which was also dingy and gross-looking, but that’s beside the point).

                  So not only could I, a retail worker, not allow anyone to use our restroom for any reason, I also could not tell them *why.*

              3. LaminarFlow*

                I love this! And, I’m sorry they were holding that employees-only line when you clearly needed a bit of empathy. They could have made things soooo much easier for themselves!

              4. Media Monkey*

                i think in the UK that pregnant women have to legally be allowed to use staff toilets if available (it’s either that or a policeman’s helmet)

                1. DeeJay*

                  I’m glad we never had anyone desperate enough to need the toilets RIGHT NOW in the UK-based shop I used to work in when we had an issue with them.

                  “No, you can’t use the staff toilets no matter how pressing the need because we had such a severe leak that there’s a huge hole where the floor used to be. We ourselves have to sneak into the customer toilets in the Golden Arches two doors down for the time being”.

      4. Username required*

        Oh no – there’d be two people barfing into the bin if I was there – I’m a sympathetic vomiter.

    2. EvilQueenRegina*

      I had something similar at one job – my predecessor had been part time so the hours that she needed the computer mostly didn’t overlap with the field guys, but I was full time so it became more of an issue.

      Eventually someone else left and wasn’t replaced and I got that desk, and the guys got another computer as well.

    3. Katydid*

      My first job after undergrad was at a mental hospital, we had a tiny office in the basement that was shared by 3 people. There were two desks and one computer. I’m not sure how it made sense to have two psych techs working at the same time, but we just alternated data entry charts and read books or the paper when not on the computer. The office had no window and was so small that you couldn’t actually sit at the desks both at the same time. The person not typing would have to sit at the end of the desk. Needless to say, my coworker and I became very close and are still friends to this day after surviving that place.

    4. OMG, Bees!*

      A tangent, formerly IT guy here. I recall 1 person had an issue with her laptop (that she solely used) and we decided to reformat it to fix it. Backed up all her data, verified no one else used it, so nothing else to back up that wasn’t hers, and reformatted it to new, problem fixed.

      Only a week later, I got in trouble for it because the company had some shady software on it under another profile (an ex employee). Last time I worked with that client, but I hated the commute anyway, so not a loss in my book.

    5. AnReAr*

      My poor mother had a similar one. After getting away from her worst boss ever she got into her worst job ever. Like most abusive things my mom was love bombed during interview stage and the horribleness didn’t come out until after she committed. She was promised a private office because some of her duties involved counseling clients, but what was to be her office was used as a junk room and they didn’t clean it out in the notice period and then waited a year to actually clean it after she came onboard. One of my moms colleagues in a completely different function had a huge office with half of it being unused and the was even a deal under that pile of junk! My mom just had to clean it herself. The door was basically useless because there was a hole in it so it was always open, and there was mouse crap everywhere.

      That place sucked so bad, mostly because it was unofficially run by a mean girl and her clique. I say mean girl but she was middle aged and had an adult daughter she convinced the president to hire in reception. Mean girl was the one who convinced the president to lay off my mom, despite my mom’s main duty being accreditation compliance, which lead to a crisis in accreditation the next year. Mean girl was an admin assistant with some accounting duties… Two years later she disappeared to somewhere in the Caribbean with a couple million she’d embezzled. She used her poor daughter as a patsy to buy time to flee the country when the relevant regulatory body notified of an upcoming investigation after all the issues they had maintaining accreditation.

  2. Elle*

    We have an ongoing issue with people not cleaning up their spills, food and somehow dirt (how does dirt get on a desk?). The worst was someone cleaned out their hairbrush and left the discarded hair on the desk.

    1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      Dirt on desk = people putting their feet up in dirty shoes.

      Or even worse, dirty bare feet. **Shudder**

      2. Lily*

        My boss used to come out of his private office, sit down, lean back, put his boots up on one of the two shared desks and read the newspaper. One of the old timers walked back in the office and said, “Hey man, there’s cow s*** on those boots.” He was literally telling the truth, as we lived in a rural area and the boss owned various cattle.

        1. shoes off the table!*

          My grandmother used to work for the county clerk in a rural area, and I don’t think I ever saw him without… ah…. encrusted boots. I don’t know that he spent much time in the actual office, which might be for the best.

          2. Sacred Ground*

            The local community bank in the farm town where I live has ne of those boot scraper things by the front door because so many of their customers are coming straight in from the fields.

          1. AMH*

            My boss used to gleefully snip his nails every day at his desk, which was approximately half an inch from me. (Un?)surprisingly, that was pretty low on his gross habits list.

            1. Clisby*

              How can you snip your nails daily? I mean, I might snip my nails every week or so – they don’t grow all that fast – is he deliberately just snipping a couple a day? Or snipping a tiny bit instead of just getting the job done? So strange.

              1. AMH*

                Correct, a few a day, a little bit at a time. It was “meditative” to him, he said. Ugh. That office was the worst for so many reasons (he also took phone calls in the bathroom frequently…I hated having to call him and then hearing the toilet flush).

      2. Susie and Elaine Problem*

        My new hypothesis: superstitions about evil sorcerers or whatever being able to use your hair or fingernail clippings to put a hex on you were created by someone ages ago who was sick of their coworkers lack of hygeine.

        The location: Mesopotamia. The year? 1766 BCE. “Hey, Gilgamesh, don’t clip your nails here in public, some warlock might use your nails to curse you!” (sotto voce: “the warlock is ME!”)

    3. Ginger Cat Lady*

      Is this a hot desking workplace? My friend’s employer went to hot desking, and a group of employees did stuff like this as protest. It didn’t work to get rid of hot desking, but it did work to get everyone mad at them. The drama was quite entertaining from my POV, but I was just hearing the wild stories and didn’t have to actually work there.

    4. LadyMTL*

      The hair would have had me gagging. I sometimes don’t even like getting my own out of my brush, and the very idea of going to work and finding some rando’s hair on the desk…blaaaargh.

      2. Jaydee*

        I have long hair, so I’m used to finding a stray hair here and there. I wouldn’t be particularly grossed out over a hair or two on the desk or chair that came from someone else. But a clump of hair cleaned out of a brush? Yuck. That goes in the trash. At home.

      3. LifebeforeCorona*

        A co-worker used to run her fingers through her long hair while waiting at the photocopier. It was pretty disgusting trying to get hair strands off the glass.

    5. bananners*

      Okay, I have long, thick hair that is always shedding and so my desk does in fact have hair on it (this post actually inspired me to clean my desk today) – but discarded from a hairbrush??? Horrifying.

      1. Guacamole Bob*

        I’m always surprised by how much hair ends up on the floor of the cabinet where I hang my coat, along with other miscellaneous dust. Hair really does get everywhere. But I wipe that up when I notice it, and it’s very clearly not intentional!

        1. Trekker*

          I woke in a classroom that has over 200 students go through it in a day, many of whom have long hair. there’s hair everywhere!

      2. K*

        My son popped out of the bathroom and indignantly yelled “mom! One of your hairs was in my buttcrack!” Idk how it got there but I certainly didn’t do it on purpose.

    6. Claire*

      Ick that reminds me of a time I watched the woman across from me on a plane brush her hair and then clean off her brush and dump the handful of hair on the floor of the plane. I am continuously shocked at how gross people can be in public.

      1. As I Live and Breathe, Raisin?!*

        Ugh, yes! Every morning I would watch a woman on the train finger-comb her very long hair and flick all the spent strands on the floor.

      2. linger*

        Back in Aug 2005 (rerun in Jan 2006), the blog “Yu Hu Stewardess” had an entry “Barefoot in the Plane”, warning passengers to keep their footwear on because of such behaviours. A sample:

        The carpet on the airplane is a terrible, terrible thing. It has gone miles without a thorough cleaning, meaning miles of spilled food, vomit, soiled baby diapers, garbage, disgusting germs and other leave behinds from previous passengers. The airlines say that the carpet gets deep cleaned about once a month. I’ve yet to see evidence of that.

        1. Media Monkey*

          also the blankets and pillows are never washed. just folded and put back for the next flight. also those little pieces of fabric on the back of the chairs (i kind of want to call them antimaccassars as that’s one of my favourite words but that might be overstating it a bit\!)

    7. Abogado Avocado*

      I used to work in a newsroom that was only a short walk away from the presses and the entrance/exit that the press operators used. This also was the newsroom’s back entrance.
      So, in addition to all the regular dirt that newsrooms acquire from piles of paper, this newsroom was stained with printer’s ink that everyone tracked in when using the back entrance. And, yes, we had a cleaning crew, but printer’s ink is oily and can be very hard to remove from surfaces.

    8. Bethany*

      At an old job I shared an area with a few ecologists. It wasn’t unusual for their desks to be covered with various types of plants, animal bones and faeces (in clear plastic baggies).

  3. CubiclesSuck*

    Coworker / shared desk (2 desks one cubicle…much like 2 girls 1 cup)

    Coworker would routinely take my pen from my side of the desk, use it to clean his ears (even while talking to me) and place it back on the desk in the center / communal area.

    He would also leave his stinky lunch remains in our shared garbage can rather than walking them back to the breakroom trash.

    Last, he would use the cubicle doorway to scratch his back and ass, often causing the panel to smell like old-butt-smell.

    Glad I left that job!

    1. Anon a Fed*

      The speed with which my jaw hit the floor reading this… EW. No one should be using a pen to clean their ears, or a door to scratch their ass!! I’m so sorry, that’s abominable.

      1. Ally McBeal*

        Before I got my Theragun I would occasionally use a wall corner to apply pressure to a stubborn knot in my back, but not even in my own home would I ever scratch my buttcrack with a wall. I swear some people are raised by wolves.

    2. Minneapolis Nonprofit*

      I have a co-worker who often asks to borrow a pen in meetings. They are company supplied pens so I always share an extra pen. if I happen to have one. at the end of the meeting, he will offer it back to me after chewing on the pen and cleaning his ears. no thank you! You’ve claimed that pen now forever

    4. FrogEngineer*

      “he would use the cubicle doorway to scratch his back and ass…”

      I can only imagine those sped-up videos of bears scratching their back against a tree and it’s making me laugh.

      1. Mrs. Pommeroy*

        Personally, I would not ever touch that pen again. It would cease being my pen, get sprayed with a heavy dose of disinfectant, and possibly be moved out of my sight just for the sheer ick-factor of the memory looking at it would trigger.
        My new pen would then live close to my body at all times.

    6. Lex Talionis*

      Sometimes after similar performances I would ask my colleague, who raised you? Your mama must be so disappointed! At least it made them stop and think for a moment. And occasionally it made them stop.

    9. SH*

      I don’t get the two girls, one cup mention in reference to this topic. Never saw the vid but def didn’t want to be reminded it existed.

    10. I Have RBF*

      Ewwwww! He used your pen to clean his ears??? I would have presented him the pen, and a box of q-tips, and told him to keep his mitts off of my writing implements. I probably would have pointedly cleaned to door jam daily, too.

  4. Midwest Cheesehead*

    I am 5′ 9″ and my mom’s office manager is 5′ 2″. During tax season as a high school and college student I often went in on the weekends to do leftover admin work for her so she didn’t get overloaded (I also got paid).

    Well I could NOT sit at her desk without having to mess with her chair, and I needed to sit there as it was the only computer with the software I needed. She got so annoyed that my mom bought me a separate chair to move back and forth.

    This woman is a legitimate saint, and is the heartbeat of my mom’s business so I really felt bad, but also had bruises on my knees from how high her chair was haha.

    1. Strive to Excel*

      A few weeks ago our office admin and I switched chairs by accident. We sit back to back and all the chairs are the same model; we think the cleaners moved them to vacuum and didn’t put them back in the same place. It was a very weird experience. I was trying to figure out how my chair had gotten so uncomfortable over the weekend. Luckily I thought to ask our admin if her chair felt weird before messing with all the levers.

        1. Strive to Excel*

          I work in a small 6-person office and it’s a problem that rarely happens, so we haven’t really worried about it! It was deep mutual confusion followed by shared amusement.

          1. ReginaG*

            Sounds like the episode of M*A*S*H where the Colonel and Radar accidentally switch their (Army-provided identical) eyeglasses.

    2. WeirdChemist*

      I occasionally have to cover a coworker’s work when she’s out, which requires that I use her workspace. I am almost a foot taller than her… yeah I have to adjust her chair too if I want any hope of fitting at her desk. And I always forget to adjust it back because her work is so mentally intensive that I’ve forgotten about it by the time I leave for the day!

    3. WhoCares*

      I have to have my chair at it’s full height or it doesn’t feel right to me. I have seen so many videos of people working with their chair so low their keyboard is practically right under their chin. How in the world can anyone work that way?

      1. Harried HR*

        FWIW – I have a long body and short legs along with back issues so I have my seat as low as it can go so I don’t have to bend over the keyboard

        1. Old Woman in Purple*

          My daughter and her bff are exactly the same hight when standing; when they sit, tho, bff is a good 6″ taller. Bff is all torso, & Daughter is all leg.

      2. Meow*

        I’m the opposite. If I can’t touch my feet on floor I feel so ungrounded that I’m afraid that I would fall and break my head.

    4. fancy pants math girl*

      Sorry, I’m with your mom’s manager on this one. Mark exactly the height and pitch of the manager’s chair, adjust it to fit you, then PUT IT BACK EXACTLY THE WAY IT WAS when you are done. (I’m shouting at the jerk who never put my chair back correctly, never even tried).

      The manager uses that chair all week. It’s HER chair. You are borrowing it for a few hours. As with anything you borrow, return it in the same or better condition.

      1. Silver Robin*

        Disagree; how do you propose we mark that? Chalk on the stands and armrests? A protractor for the angles? Less time for everyone to just adjust to what you need when you sit down… Maybe this is because my org hot desks, so my morning always involves a moment or two of adjusting, but I do not even redo the seat for my partner when I occasionally drive. There is no good way to actually make sure it is “EXACTLY THE WAY IT WAS” because I do not live in his body and cannot make the little micro adjustments he needs.

  5. Gus McCrae*

    Not 100% on topic, but this reminds of the time I moved to a new-to-me desk and found that the previous occupant used one of the drawers as a receptacle for fingernail clippings. Lots and lots of them.

    2. Strive to Excel*

      That is apparently horrifyingly common based on the open thread from late last year about what people have found in inherited desks/offices.

      1. Personal Best in Consecutive Days Lived*

        Just a shout out to the person I inherited my desk from, who only left behind dust, a coffee mug, and some out of date technical manuals. I appreciate you!

    3. iglwif*

      That is horrifying. But what’s even more horrifying is that I have heard of this happening to multiple people.

      1. OMG, Bees!*

        What’s interesting in this post is what is gross to some isn’t as bad to me, such as shedded hair. And that leaving nail clippings is apparently super common. I will say that I need to wash my hands after clipping my nails (and throwing them away, I am not an animal)

    4. Juicebox Hero*

      One of my coworkers used to save up his fingernail clippings in his desk drawer specifically so that no one would mess with his stuff. One time he was on vacation and someone else needed something out of his desk, but no one would open it because of the fingernails.

      I cleaned them out and was considered a hero by my coworkers.

      He tried to blame it on the desk’s previous occupant, but if you inherited a drawer full of fingernails why the hell wouldn’t you clean them out?

      1. Audrey Puffins*

        I would not be able to clean them out, my constitution is not that strong. I wouldn’t be able to keep them though! I inherited something in my drawers at my current job that was much less revolting (a NSFW Secret Santa gift apparently), and instead of relocating the item in question, I simply located an empty set of drawers and switched out the entire unit

    6. mango chiffon*

      Cannot understand clipping fingernails anywhere other than at home. It cannot be that serious that you can’t simply wait till the end of the day to clip your nails!

      1. Juicebox Hero*

        I do clip mine at work (I have crummy nails that peel and split, and if a split reaches the nail bed, OUCH) but I do it in my own office into the wastebasket under the desk.

        1. JB (not in Houston)*

          Yep, I sometimes clip mine at work, but in my own office, with the door closed, over my trash can.

      2. Slytherin Bookworm*

        I have very brittle nails that will break easily with the slightest provocation, so I carry nail clippers in my purse, so I don’t have to deal with the broken nail until I get home hours later. As a result, I’ve clipped them in the office, but it was just the one nail that was damaged, not all of them.

        1. Zephy*

          This kind of thing is why I carry a nail *file*, to take care of jagged or sharp edges and keep them from catching on things until I can get home. I don’t know if nail dust is more or less objectionable than clippings, certainly less obviously perceptible.

      3. Spacewoman Spiff*

        The number of people I’ve seen clipping their nails on public transit…it’s so gross. Feels CLEARLY like an at-home activity to me!

        1. Bathroom only. Please.*

          Oh god, this happened to me once when I was in a window seat. I never sat anywhere I couldn’t easily get up again.

          You would think this is my worst fingernail-clipping in public story, but no–once the lady seated behind me at a Broadway show (in the balcony so her knees and hands were at about head-level) clipped and filed every single nail in the 5 minutes before the curtain went up.

        3. dulcinea47*

          I lived in an apartment across the hall from a guy who would come out into the (shared) hallway to clip his nails, and of course leave the clippings all over out there. SO. FOUL.

      4. Mad Scientist*

        Same. I understand folks commenting below and explaining that they do this if a nail breaks or something, but that would presumably be an occasional occurrence of clipping a single nail to prevent further injury / nuisance, not a regular habit. The people who REGULARLY clip their nails at work horrify me. The sound makes me want to throw up every time I hear it in an office setting. Work is not the place for personal hygiene! And if you must do personal hygiene at work, do it in a private office with a closed door, or better yet, the bathroom, where such activities belong!

      5. Elizabeth West*

        Once at OldExjob, a vendor came in to take the shipping guy to lunch. He was standing in front of my desk and whipped out a clipper to clip his nails. When I heard the *clipclip* I turned around and asked him politely not to do that on the carpet there. I got a pissy attitude for my effort. Eff you, buddy, I’m not cleaning up your biological detrius.

      6. I Have RBF*

        I used to have a heavy metal nail file at work, because if my nails got a snag, I could easily rip my nail down to the quick if it caught on anything. I would use the file to smooth the snag. But when I clip my nails the trimmings go straight into the trash, at home. I can’t understand saving them.

    7. mreasy*

      This happened to me when I moved offices. The kicker is that the previous occupant of the office was the company president!

    8. Your Yuck is too much*

      At old job I moved cubicles. Not only was there a drawer with nail clippings in it, the carpet under the desk had tons of nail clippings stuck in it!

      Another employee told me that Jack, who had the cubicle before me, not only cut his fingernails (drawer clippings) but his toenails (stuck in carpet) during long phone meetings!

      I was thrilled when it was announced two months later we were getting new carpeting. I made sure to remove my name tag and any other identifying info from my cubicle before they came so they couldn’t associate the floor full of clippings with my name.

    9. Sparkles McFadden*

      This should be a rare thing but it really is not. There should be an official name for this. If there isn’t, I hereby dub this Ungius Cidentis Servans disorder.

    10. Spinner of Light*

      Was his name Loki, by any chance? If so, perhaps he’d been saving his nail clippings to build Naglfar. On second thought, that ship was made of the nails of the dead, so there goes THAT theory! (And a good thing, too, since Loki will sail the huge ship Naglfar to ferry monsters to fight, and eventually slay, the gods at Ragnarok.)

      On the other hand, he may simply have been an inconsiderate slob…there are a lot more of those around than supernatural Scandinavian tricksters.

      1. Chirpy*

        The ship was built from the nails of the dead, which is why you’re supposed to keep your nails short and throw the clippings in a fire. That way, it takes longer to get enough materials to build the ship, and therefore postpones Ragnarok.

        Seems to me that the ancient Norse also had issues with people leaving nail clippings everywhere.

  6. Her My Own Knee*

    I took over a desk and computer of a person who moved departments. The first day on the job I wasn’t really on the computer much, if at all, as I was being shown around the facility, and shadowing with others. On the second day I went to log in and noticed an ant walking across my keyboard. I got a tissue and dispatched him to the trash. Then I saw another one. And another one. I got up, flipped my keyboard upside-down and shook it. Friends, dozens and dozens of ants along with an entire plate worth of crumbs & shredded cheese came flying out. My boss called the facilities person to spray my entire desk down and I was moved to the other side of the room. Apparently the man who previously occupied that desk was quite the snacker, and didn’t care to clean up after himself.

    2. Amber Rose*

      When I started this job I asked for an ergonomic keyboard and mouse. I don’t actually care that much about the kind of keyboard I use. My problem was that my predecessor’s keyboard and mouse were actually crusted with guck. I had to wash my hands multiple times a day out of sheer horror.

      1. I Have RBF*

        I used to work in a quasi help desk support role. My team regularly had to clean up computers after departed employees. We used gloves and rubbing alcohol. I think the worst was the laptop keyboard encrusted with… stuff, and included a ton of crumbs and beard hair. It was nasty.

    3. Holly Gibney*

      SHREDDED. CHEESE. Wow. When I was issued my laptop at my last job, it was immediately apparent that IT does NOT clean the equipment between users. First I used canned air to get rid of the crumbs, after which my desk looked like the little tray in the bottom of the toaster. Then I used not one, not two, but THREE wipes to clean the actual keys–by the time I was done, all three wipes were fully brown. It was harrowing.

      Doesn’t hold a candle to shredded cheese and ants, though.

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        try Q-Tips and rubbing alcohol to really get in the crevices/be permanently truamatized.

    7. iglwif*

      My second full-time job was an 8-month maternity cover for someone else in my department. I knew she’d been snacking a lot because we sat next to each other, separated only by a fabric workstation wall, but the amount of crumbs, poppy and sesame seeds, and other snack debris that rained down when I turned over her fancy ergonomic keyboard for the first time was far beyond my worst expectations.

      When I was pregnant myself a couple years later, I tried very, very hard to snack not right over the keyboard, because I did not want my mat leave replacement to have that experience. I don’t know how well I succeeded but I really tried!

      1. Elizabeth West*

        I eat at my desk all the time, both at home and at work, and I turn my keyboard over and wipe my desk off regularly. I don’t want to be that person at work. Not to mention that the maintenance guy at Exjob told me that every single building downtown has rats in it somewhere. *shudder* I definitely don’t want them gallivanting across my desk!

    8. Ally McBeal*

      This is so much worse than the singular (but giant) cockroach that once fell from the ceiling onto my desk, less than a foot from my left hand. It’s also so much worse than the time I decided I wanted to start doing push-ups at home and discovering an ant problem when my face was 3 inches from the floor. I don’t know if I could’ve ever set foot in that office/cubicle again.

    9. Raida*

      This is why when I move to a fully new desk I get a new keyboard, mouse, headset.
      I cover it up by saying it’s all ergonomics, but the reality is that I’d rather buy my own stuff for a few hundred dollars than touch some of the keyboards and mice around

    10. goddessoftransitory*

      People have NO idea how much of an ecosystem can build up in a keyboard.

      My boss used to have me clean the cubicles as a slow-day project, and those keyboards–I’d tap them on the desk and an archeological dig would tumble out. I cannot fathom touching them over and over.

      1. Wolf*

        It’s a well-known prank to put cress seeds in old keyboards. Almost every time, there are enough nutrients for little plants to grow.

      2. AnReAr*

        I make that one of my slow day projects on the two computers my coworkers and I share. I am extremely prone to sinus infections so it’s mostly self preservation. But the worst I’ve seen was when I was recently hanging out with my mom at her place of work after hours and decided to clean the keyboard of a recently vacated employee… It’s a private office but there was so much more crumbs and gunk than my five coworker keyboard! I need to believe that half of what feel out was just dried makeup flakes. Took three days after for my sinus issues to abate.

    11. ThinkIWouldHaveEscapedByNow*

      In my previous job they moved us around every month or so and myself and another colleague always complained at how disgusting the keyboard and mice were. We’re talking thick crusted matter on the whole mouse including the bottom and enough crumbs and crusted dirt to make the keyboard keys stick.
      We would both spend ages between calls scraping and cleaning until they were clean and then be moved the next week to start the process all over again!

      We figured out later that they were moving us to the gross desks so we would clean them as no one else would!

      Thankfully my current job I keep the same desk but it is a dust magnet and the only crumbs I have are my own! But there have been rumors of potential future hot desking so I may forward this thread!

  7. Babyfaced Crone*

    My office did not have hot desks but we did have a volunteer well known for popping in and making calls from any empty workstation. Typically the worst one might expect would be an empty Diet Coke can or two left behind—but not me. I once returned from a day off to find a pair of dentures (covered with masticated food bits) on my desk.

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        I would think so, but how do you leave, go home and go through your day/night routine without noticing your TEETH are missing?

    4. LaminarFlow*

      Ummmm noooo! Also, I can’t imagine running after someone with “hey, I think you left your dentures behind?” in the casual tone one might employ when notifying someone they left an umbrella or notebook behind.

    5. OMG, Bees!*

      You reminded me of my first job, which was hot desking in shifts of like 4 hours due to being students. The girl who used my computer before me would have a monster energy drink and then leave it in a growing pile in the corner of the room. It got at least 4 feet tall, shaped like a pyramid, before I quit a couple months later (scummy job). Worst part was the sickening sweet smell.

      I don’t know why no one throw the cans away.

  8. KToo*

    One word – boogers. We had day and night shift, and had to share desks. The person who used my desk at night would leave their boogers all over, including the phone handset. I had to spend the first part of my shift cleaning everything before I could even put my things on the desk. Day and night shifts – including mangers – never saw each other and there was no HR to speak of so nothing was done about it when I complained. Thankfully the person either figured out tissues exist, started cleaning up after themself, or left the company quickly. I never did figure it out but was just happy to not have to deal with their dried up snots on everything.

    2. Bunch Harmon*

      So gross! One of my coworkers at a previous job got promoted. When she moved into her new space, there were lots of boogers on the underside of the chair. She had to beg for a new one.

    4. Mid*

      I came to say the same thing. So. Many. Boogers.

      We have tissues everywhere. They’re in every meeting room, every table, every supply closet, and every desk. And yet, some people have not outgrown 5 year old behavior and wipe their boogers on tables and chairs. I debated taping mouse traps to the underside of the desk so the wiper would be incentivized to stop their behavior. I haven’t been in the office in months, so I’m unsure if they stopped (but I doubt it.)

    5. Ally McBeal*

      Lord above. I’d prefer to know my coworkers were EATING their boogers rather than wiping them all over our desks/offices.

  9. C*

    I’m based in the UK – Since I joined the “office based” working world (c10 years ago), I have never had my own desk. Every office has had “hot desking” so you pack up your things at the end of the day and pop them in a locker or take them home. To the point that I do a double take when I walk past a desk with photos or personal items as it’s such an anomaly. It’s really interesting that this is such a cultural difference – but I guess we just generally have more people per amount of space here, so space is always at a premium.

    Just did a quick stats google – according to Wikipedia, the UK has 720 people per square mile (279 per square km) and the USA has 91 (35).

    1. londonedit*

      Could be industry-specific because I’m also in the UK and I’d never encountered shared/hot desking until we went back to the office after the Covid lockdowns. Things like US-style ‘cubicle farms’ aren’t common here, in my experience – either it’ll be a big open-plan office floor with groups of desks and just a few individual offices for the higher-ups and some private meeting rooms, or (as in the case of my current job) it’ll be an office building with rooms, and each team shares a room with a few desks in it. We now have shared desks and lockers, because we’re not all in the office at the same time, but this is the first time I’ve worked in that sort of setup.

    2. QV_ContractHR*

      I’ve worked at 2 global companies and both had a hot desk policy. I switched over to a US-owned corp now and I have my own cubicle! It is a huge difference to see how people decorate their cubicles. I’m just glad to not have to lug absolutely everything with me every day now.

      I know I’ve really made it when I get an office with a door.

      1. Anonymosity*

        My current workplace is almost all hotdesking. Unfortunately, most of the reservable desks have something wrong with at least one peripheral. And you cannot know that from the reservation app, not until you plug in and try to work. I can’t understand why they don’t just assign desks; the office is enormous. There is more than enough room for the employees who come in at least two or three days to have their own desks. Frankly, if you have your own space, you’re more likely to want to come in, in my experience.

    3. DogRiverFunDays*

      I don’t know many people in the UK who hot-desk? It probably depends a lot on what type of industry you’re in.
      A colleague of mine did tell me about a place she worked, though, where staff were ranged at standing desks around the room and were required to all move desks every few months, which I thought was wild. In my industry, though, actual functionality of the workspace tends to take second place to VIBES, so it makes sense.

      1. EllenD*

        In UK civil service, they’ve moved to hot desking over the last 15 years. Mainly to save cost of office space, but also made the desks smaller to allow for lockable cabinets/drawers to fit in. Smaller footprint and fewer desks mean less office space needed and so leases given up. In same period also growth in working from home, especially since Covid, although Ministers are expecting civil servants to return to the office – but there aren’t enough desks for everyone to be in every day.

    4. Jackalope*

      That a bit misleading as a stat, though, since there some areas in the US that are completely uninhabited (and honestly don’t really lend themselves to people living there). Cities and their surroundings can be very densely populated.

      1. So they all cheap-ass rolled in and one fell out*

        NYC has twice the population density of London (29k vs 14k per square mile)

      2. MigraineMonth*

        Exactly. The US is an enormous country by distance, but a fair number of its states have more cows than people.

        1. AnReAr*

          But we’re still third largest in the world in both landmass and population. It really is a kind of unique situation with our demographics that’s hard for anyone from another country to understand.

    5. Storm in a teacup*

      I’m in the UK and have always had a desk until I recently moved into our global offices (we are an American company) and I now have to hot desk. I’ve sat at the same ‘hot’ desk for months. But technically I cannot claim it as mine. It’s so annoying as I need to adjust the screens and need a better chair that I can actually use.
      Apparently a lot of people have complained so they’re considering going back to named desks as one of the ways of getting people more likely to come into the office.

      1. Anonymosity*

        Maybe we should all band together and try this at my workplace. They want us to come in at least two days per week now. I’m sure plenty of people will be happy to be onsite more often if they don’t have to fight with the non-working monitors and sticky keyboards.

    7. Artemesia*

      The US has huge stretches of unpopulated dessert, prairie, mountain ranges etc so the populated areas are probably at least a dense as the UK — the whole state of Wyoming only has about half a million residents (but they get 2 Senators as does California with its nearly 40 million residents.

      1. Honey cocoa*

        Washington DC has a higher population a than Wyoming or Vermont and they get no Senators. And there’s no reason the residential parts of DC need to be federal. And as a tall person, sharing desk chairs is just awkward.

    8. WhoCares*

      That would drive me absolutely crazy. I HAVE to have my own desk and I want no one to ever touch it. I’m so glad I work from home. It’s mine, no one else can have it and I don’t have to worry about senseless moves every 6 months either.

    10. Anita Brake*

      This statistic, along with the previous content about various unhygienic, icky things, makes me want to move to, and work in, Montana. There’s gotta be fewer people per square km there!

      1. not nice, don't care*

        Fewer people, more bigots. Just heard from a friend in law enforcement that the fun new thing to do is call 911 to report brown people, in hopes of ICE picking them up.

        1. MT here*

          Montana is pretty big itself too– plenty of racists (though let’s be real, they’re not limited to rural states), but also some progressive, inclusive pockets, and lots of us trying to make things better.
          (I don’t have to hotdesk at my job, but we don’t have enough spaces for everyone in the building who would want to work there! The size of the state really doesn’t correlate to the size of the office.)

    11. goddessoftransitory*

      It’s a big thing here because of RTO policies for Amazon and similar–but they ditched a lot of equipment and space in the pandemic, and now are cramming a full workforce into half the area. Working out juuuuust swimmingly.

    12. Media Monkey*

      i’ve never worked in anything but an open office, and most have no offices for senior people. it’s only since covid that i’ve seen hot desking and that’s been the norm in all 4 offices i’ve worked in since lockdown.

    13. ElenaSSF*

      On that statistic about people per square mile.It’s a little bit misleading since the U.S has vast empty tracts where nobody lives. In the settled parts, our density is probably about half yours. But in the unsettled parts where we’re talking deserts and mountain buttes and high peaks.It’s just not an equivalent factor.

  10. CzechMate*

    I was a school admin working in an itsy bitsy teeny weenie yellow chaired office with another admin named Daniel. Daniel was a terrible coworker, but something that (admittedly irrationally) drove me up the wall was that he would always clip his fingernails at his desk.

    Daniel was also a man with VERY set, unmovable ideas about gender, masculinity, and his own manliness. One time, a female student came in to see me and asked if she could borrow a manicure set because she had a hang nail. I told her, “I don’t have one, unfortunately, but why don’t you ask Daniel? I’m pretty sure he does.”

    The look on his face when she went over and asked to use his manicure set was everything. He didn’t cut his nails at his desk again after that.

    1. Her My Own Knee*

      I had a coworker in our open office space that used to do that. One day I just had enough and asked him loudly if wouldn’t mind doing that in the bathroom… at home. He stopped after that.

      1. Name (Required)*

        Agreed that this a rational irritation! People who clip their nails in an office setting drive me bonkers.

        But I love this story. So much. It is so good!

        1. Butterfly Counter*

          I remember being on the bus in Chicago and a lady pulled out her nail clippers. And those suckers stared flying!

          I think this was an instance I got off the bus and got on the next one that came along.

    4. WhoCares*

      Good think I work from home then cause I clip my nails at my desk all the time. I don’t see an issue.

      1. Mid*

        It’s a rather piercing/loud noise, and the clippings tend to shoot off in unpredictable ways, so anyone in a 10 ft radius is on high alert for an aerial attack, and people are likely to find the clippings in unexpected locations at a later date, and that’s gross.

        It’s also a body grooming thing, and people in polite society have agreed that body grooming is private and should be dealt with at home/in a bathroom/in private, not in a public setting, especially with a captive audience (coworkers who can’t leave, or people on the bus.)

    5. NotThis!*

      I had a boss that did this, and one time he did this while in a meeting with me, just me and him. His nail FLEW INTO MY EYE!!! I had to run to the bathroom and after that, he stopped doing it around me, but I could still hear it from outside his office…

  11. Tea Monk*

    It’s not a horror story, but there’s nothing worse than working together in a conference room and someone randomly starts playing music or on a loud meeting or having a long phone call with someone who is upset. ( especially if they’re on speaker phone)

    1. Dinwar*

      It doesn’t even have to be someone upset! I have coworkers that discuss work topics, but never learned “inside voice” vs “outside voice”. It’s fine that they’re talking about llama grooming, but I’m compiling teapot sales and don’t need to hear all those numbers being rattled off or an in-depth discussion of the drainage for the new stables! And if, as happens occasionally, those discussions get heated, you can wave good-by to your ability to focus….

      Shared workspaces, or unassigned workspaces, make this harder because you never know how far away you’re going to be near such a person.

    2. EJ*

      I used to work in a similar kind of setup with a woman who was constantly having loud, aggrieved phone calls with her rebellious teen daughter, or with her husband about the rebellious teen daughter. I’m sorry she seemed to be having such a tough time in her family life, but boy, I didn’t need to hear that much about it while trying to get work done.

      1. Casino Royale*

        I used to work at a cubicle farm (with a VERY quiet atmosphere) that had an employee like that. Daily, loud, long phone conversations (on her desk phone) with her two sons, or her husband about her two idiot sons. (I’m sorry but based on her phone calls, they were idiots). My coworkers and I would compare notes across the office Slack channels.

        One day, the phone calls stopped so we figured someone must have finally said something to her. But then the phone calls started up again–in the ladies’ bathroom on her cell phone. One of my teammates was in the bathroom during such a phone call and had the audacity to flush (because: bathroom) so then Phone Lady started loudly complaining on her call about who does that, who flushes in a bathroom while someone is on the phone, etc. My teammate did not care and went about her business.
        After that, Phone Lady took her personal calls just inside the back entrance.

        Also, she was part-time (like 15-20 hours a week) and these phone calls lasted maybe 1-2 hours each. And there was never JUST one phone call per day. I don’t actually know what she did all day besides walking her teen kids through how to pack their suitcases for an upcoming trip, or what to wear for a job interview, or complaining to her husband about either of the above.

        1. goddessoftransitory*

          I love the image of you and husband having a little Slack coffee Lach about the office soap!

    3. MigraineMonth*

      I used to work at a company where we developed extremely configurable software, so we had about equal numbers of software developers and customer-side configuration specialists who spent 10 hours a day on customer phone calls. We all worked in semi-private 2-person offices.

      At one point, someone in management had the genius idea of putting one software developer and one configuration specialist in each office; that way the configuration specialist could get their questions answered immediately, and the software developers would understand customer needs better.

      I’m assuming there were multiple murder attempts in the couple of weeks it took management to scrap the idea.

    4. It's Marie - Not Maria*

      I had a coworker in a shared space who would wear headphones and start singing LOUDLY to whatever song they were listening to. They… did not have a good singing voice. It took intervention from their Grand Boss to finally get them to stop. And they pouted about it – for the rest of the time I worked for the company (several months – who knows, they may still be pouting about it years later?)

      1. Jasmine Tea*

        Once a year I have drive to a meeting an hour away with a coworker who loves to sing along with the music. Not a great voice. The second time I brought instrumental jazz CDs. No words. She was very sad and quiet, but it wasn’t her car and she wasn’t driving. Problem solved!

      2. GreenApplePie*

        Thankfully this was a one-time incident but in college I once got stuck next to someone (library, finals, limited seating) that was constantly humming and singing along to the music in her headphones. At first I just assumed she’d wear herself out after a while but she just kept singing and singing… for the entire 10 hours I was in there.

    5. OMG, Bees!*

      Had a coworker who would take family calls and not even leave her desk. Her reasoning was that since she was speaking Mandarin and we couldn’t understand it, it was fine. Nevermind that she was much louder on the phone than normal

  12. AnonInCanada*

    While we usually don’t share desks here, there are times when someone will sit at mine on my days off. I always know when he was at my desk, because he will move things around and NEVER put them back to where he got them from after he’s done. Hence why I know when I get into the office and find my monitors moved far closer to the chair or certain shared documents zoomed 200% (and of course not zoomed back), he’s been there. Seriously, I think he should have a chit chat with his optometrist, who should refer him to an ophthalmologist.

    1. EvilQueenRegina*

      Years ago, I could always tell when then-boss had sat at my then-desk, because I always found the ringer on my phone turned to mute.

    2. Elizabeth West*

      My boss at OldLabJob did that. There were two locations — he lived in the other one in a different state. He had a HUGE desk in in his private office at our location, probably twice the size of mine.

      Interestingly, there was a Murphy bed in there too, and he would stay in the building instead of renting a hotel room when he — or he and his wife; she passed away when he was with us and we were gutted, we loved her — came to our office once a month. There was a shower in the basement. Not luxurious digs, but serviceable. Despite his setup, for some reason, he liked to sit at my desk when I wasn’t there and he would always rearrange everything.

      I just this minute found out he passed away on February 6. Gaw, I loved that job. I wish I could be as happy working anywhere else as I was there. It was the perfect thing at the time for me, even though he drove me nuts moving all my stuff around, lol. Rest in peace, bossman.

    3. K*

      A friend of mine used to share his office with another coworker who primarily worked at a different site and only came to the main office once a month or so. He could always tell when she’d been there because the framed photo of his wife that sat on the desk would be flipped face-down. So weird.

  13. Juicebox Hero*

    Back in my retail days, under the register we had a drawer to put charge receipts and miscellaneous supplies in. One woman would not only come to work sick, but she’d leave her snotty tissues in this drawer that everyone else had to get into all the time. And there was a wastebasket right there under the counter!

    2. Zona the Great*

      Dear Glob. I’d have gathered them (with a clean tissue) and put them in a ziploc with her name on it. That’s really awful.

    3. Ialwaysforgetmyname*

      I adore my best friend but she won’t stop leaving her used tissues all over my car when we go places together. On the floor, in the door well, in the center console… she’s just oblivious to why that’s gross. I even keep a small garbage bag in the car at all times!

  14. HayHayHay*

    I used to work at a place where there was a morning shift and a night shift, so everyone shared a desk with one other person. I brought in a little 8×10 picture and hung it up on one half of the little area because I needed something to look at (no windows), but didn’t want to overwhelm my desk mate.

    The night shift guy across from me had no such consideration. The three little walls of his desk area were absolutely COVERED in stuff – photos, a framed Nickelodeon Magazine with Larissa Oleynik on the cover (when she was a child on Alex Mack), the slipcover of an X-Files DVD box set, the sticker they put on the corner of a television set to tell you it’s screen size… Just the most bizarre stuff. His deskmate finally complained and he was told he could only decorate one half of the space. So when I came in the next morning, he had meticulously measured the space so he was taking up exactly half. At Christmas, he brought in a family photo album and left it open to a different page every day. Then he brought in one child size dress up Cinderella high heel.

    This plus many, many, MANY other things led to him eventually being fired.

      1. Juicebox Hero*

        I have so many questions, none of which I quite know how to articulate or really want answers to…

  15. NYWeasel*

    My shared desk space story is probably insignificant compared to others but Other User consistently left belongings, trash, and food debris week after week. Eventually I simply dumped everything onto a side shelf. Every week I just added more. Left garbage? It’s now on top of your notebook. Dirty coffee cup? Look on the shelf! Other User ignored the growing pile until Big Boss was visiting and then somehow the pile disappeared, never to be seen again. Other User moved to a new station and someone else started who’s generally much cleaner. Still, I have a small pile on the Garbage Shelf that gets added to every couple of weeks.

  16. BLA*

    Coworker #1 shared a desk with Coworker #2 who was going through a drawn out break-up with Coworker #3. We were never quite sure if the relationship was officially over. One day Coworker #1 found multiple photos cut up into little pieces in the desk (our building had a photobooth that printed physical photos). Coworker #1 realized they were all either photos that included Coworker #3. That wasn’t the official end of their break-up, but it did add to the lore as they continued to go off and on for years.

  17. Enescudoh*

    My first ever internship about ten years ago, I would work from the desktop of whichever Partner was working from home that day. I used to see their email notifications as they came in – I wouldn’t click on them obviously but would get the message preview pop up on screen. One day while working at Partner Simon’s desk, Partner Sue forwarded him an email which was an expression of interest from someone else wanting to do an internship there. Her introduction to the email was “I’ve been so unimpressed with Enescudoh I don’t think we should take any more interns.” To this day I have absolutely no idea what I had done wrong.

    1. Richard Hershberger*

      Even stipulating to the partner’s impression of your performance, this is weirdly over-generalized. If you were the latest in a long string of unsuccessful interns, it would be reasonable to conclude that they should not do any more internships. But going from being unimpressed with one intern to interns as a group suggests an incapacity for abstract thought.

    2. Ainsley*

      I had a similar experience as a student teacher – I had to use my cooperating teacher’s login to take student attendance and her email was up on the screen. A professor I collaborated with in college on a book chapter had emailed my cooperating teachers saying the book was about to be published and to check out my work. (This is a small state and all the teachers of this subject knew each other basically – especially because this professor had been a teacher and worked in the teacher education field). Her reply to my other cooperating teacher was basically: “Why should we care about this? Ainsley sucks.” I wasn’t snooping; the email was literally up on the screen. I wasn’t always the world’s best student teacher but I was 22 and still learning. I wasn’t bad by any means (plus the mean cooperating teacher had about 2 or 3 years on me if that – it’s not like she was incredibly experienced and talented yet.) I was totally crushed by this and like you, not sure what exactly I did wrong.

      1. The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon*

        My experience has been that the person who is meanest about you not knowing something is the person who knows exactly one more thing than you. They are highly invested in differentiating your state of knowledge from their state of knowledge. Even not knowing any of the people involved, I would bet that was the root of the comment, so really nothing to do with you at all.

      2. Ally McBeal*

        I was given legacy access to my previous supervisor’s email account after she resigned. I was searching for something not long after that and found an email from our IT guy to my supervisor, basically calling me an idiot and questioning whether I had a future at the company (I’d only been there about six months at that point). I can’t remember now what prompted it – all I know is I’d sent him an email with a Q and he forwarded that email with his mean comments – and she’d immediately defended me, but I had a pit in my stomach for weeks. I was 24 and working in a field I’d never worked in before, of course I was going to have questions. But he was a meaniehead in general so I eventually learned to just keep my distance.

      3. goddessoftransitory*

        She frankly sounds like a jealous Mean Girl. I would bet that was A) left up for spite and B) definitely says a lot more about her maturity and professionalism levels than it does about you!

  18. Junior Dev*

    Ok, mine is nowhere near as gross as some of these with the nail clippings and food and whatnot. But I had an internship at a legal nonprofit that did both legislative advocacy and court stuff. My job was to research and do data entry for a public database people could use to look up information related to what we did, so I was pretty siloed off from everyone else.

    They sat me at the only available desk which was right at the front of the office. There was an office manager who also did receptionist type stuff who sat behind me, but she had migraines and worked from home half the time. So i effectively became the receptionist. People with appointments would come in and (reasonably) expect me to lead them to or call whoever they were there to see.

    I did not have anyone’s calendars, contact info or even know most of their names. I was not trained or equipped to be a receptionist at all. When I talked to my boss about it she made vaguely sympathetic noises but did nothing. I asked for advice online and from friends/family and got told I was being “entitled” and”thought I was too good for” a job I had no training or ability to do. Not to mention I was unable to focus on my actual work projects due to the constant interruptions.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      It’s always weird when people accuse you of “thinking you’re too good for” a job that you lack the skills to do. I don’t know what world they’re living in where someone with zero experience can immediately get a job as a restaurant server because they applied, but even if I got the job I’d get fired within the month because I am *really bad* at tasks requiring memory, speed and juggling multiple tasks.

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        Right? What are these jobs that require no training or familiarity or experience?

        I find people who lob that kind of accusation usually are the ones who are dividing jobs up into “worthy” and “Not.”

        1. Chirpy*

          This, to be good at retail you have to have a really great spatial memory, knowledge of potentially thousands of products, and decent organizational and people skills. Not to mention multitasking and the ability to switch tasks constantly.

        2. Wolf*

          Also, they often don’t understand what a job actually is. They are unaware that a cashier knows stuff about the store computers and the goods they sell, or that a cleaner is certified in hygiene standards for different environments. They think it’s “just scanning” or “just sweeping”.

  19. Anon For This*

    Once upon a time, I was one of several interns in a web-based position. Our roles included a lot of social media, so we were allowed to browse our personal accounts throughout the day, and most of us followed each other. Naturally, I made a point of keeping my following on those accounts to SFW items.

    Imagine my horror when I scrolled down to find porn on my timeline. It had been reposted just moments before, by a fellow intern, from the desk they shared with a coworker.

  20. S*

    I briefly worked for a company that had recently abandoned hot-desking and was redesigning parts of its office space, including removing the lockers used to store people’s things. One day, a work crew came in and abruptly cleaned out everyone’s lockers with no notice, moving shoes and bags and god knows what else to some unknown location, then sent an email telling everyone who had a lock on their locker to remove it immediately. I wrote an articulate email for my supervisor to send back to the work crew, explaining that my locked locker held a breakable medical device that I required to avoid pain and lost productivity (I was a nursing mother, and the device was a breast milk pump), and rooting around in that locker and taking my possessions without no notice would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The boss had been enraged by this entire thing to the point of slamming doors, and he was quite happy with my email.

  21. CherryBlossom*

    I’m currently sharing a two-person desk with the most over-zealous EA I’ve ever met.

    She’ll constantly look at my screen and comment on whatever I’m working on. She has often told me to stop/change what I’m doing, in direct opposition to our manager’s instructions. She’ll grab things I’ve ordered for the company off my desk because she’s “the only one who really knows” where things belong, meaning things get lost. She’s also a rambler, meaning a simple “You need to do X” turns into a multi-paragraph mouthspew, and she’ll get offended if I try to cut her off.

    The worst is, she’s blocked me from being able to take on any other responsibilities because, again, she’s “the only one who really knows” anything. She’s annoyed my workload is light compared to her’s, but she doesn’t want to let anything of substance go. So we’re both sitting here, seething at each other, for reasons entirely of her own creation.

    I’ve spoken to my manager about this, but even though Manager is technically in charge of both of us, the CEO favors her and often rules in her favor. So there’s not much either of us can do except do our best to work around her. Yes, I am job-hunting.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      I think a 2-person desk would do immeasurable psychic damage to me, let alone the ‘hoarde the work then complain about workload’ interpersonal BS. Sending you ‘new job’ vibes!!

  22. wounded, erratic stink bugs*

    Shared a computer with a coworker. We both had predominantly office-based jobs and we worked the same schedule. She was having some health issues, which meant she sometimes nodded off at her desk… which was also my desk, which made asking “hey, are you done with our computer for now, I need to use it” difficult. (She is okay.)
    This was within the past five years. I eventually got my own computer, and didn’t even have to threaten to quit, although I do wish I hadn’t had to ask at all.

    1. Mid*

      Why do workplaces have people sharing computers? They aren’t hugely expensive, and I feel like paying someone to be in the office and only be able to do work 50% of the time is far more expensive, overall. If you’re paying someone $30k to be in the office full time, and they have to share a computer, so they can only work 50% of the time, you’re spending $15k/year/person, which is…a lot of very nice computers.

      1. Jestem*

        In my workplace, we run 24/7 as a manufacturing plant. Different stations don’t need a single PC per operator, but a single PC per role, therefore a single shared desktop is deployed for a team to use.
        It’s in use 24/7.

        1. Kuddel Daddeldu*

          That’s very common in non-office work (retail, hospitality, manufacturing, ships/offshore…) where personal workstations would not only be unnecessary, but where would you put them?
          Even in office work, when I started my career in engineering, my team of 6 had a single terminal and for CAD work I needed to reserve space at a workstation in a different room. Now that was the 80s and these things were hugely expensive.

  23. Night Shift*

    I had to share a desk with the night shift at a 24/hr medical residential facility. That’s typical but my desk was also the reception area and our day management were militant about the front area being welcoming and clean. I came to work with boogers and snot all over my keyboard, food smeared everywhere, charts and PHI left out in plain sight, food smeared all over medical charts, cigarette butts (dude) and vape cartridges in the trash. The area smelled horrible all the time, he left broken furniture piled up by the door. I would get chewed out almost every morning about the mess he left the night before and since I was young I’d take it to heart and blame myself. I went on vacation and came back, nervous that the reception area would be blown to bits, but it was sparkling fresh. Apparently the woman who temped for me while I was gone came in early and let him have it, and it never got dirty again.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        Come on now. They were young and unaware of workplace norms. Most young people leave school thinking that management/leadership is logical, rational, and correct – a reasonable assumption based on that is if you’re getting in reprimanded, you are responsible for whatever caused it. We all know that leadership is human and often extremely incorrect, but unless you have a real firestarter-type family you are probably trained to listen and obey

    3. Kuddel Daddeldu*

      No horrors here. We have switched to hot-desking after Covid (we’re hybrid now, with lots of flexibility).
      Desks are cleaned overnight (there’s a card on each desk, letting the cleaners know it has been used) and we have individual keyboards and mice. Desk drawers are a thing of the past, we have lockers for our stuff. Not ideal (I loved my planning calendar on the wall) but definitely hygienic.

  24. KayDeeAye*

    So this isn’t really a shared desk, but it was a shared table. I was at an all-staff meeting, and I noticed that one of my table-mates was spending a LOT of time on her phone, which is something that really isn’t done at these meetings – at least not by anybody who doesn’t want dirty looks from leadership and possibly a lecture afterwards. She was holding it in such a way that a few people, including me, could clearly see that she was texting. And it went on for a good long while, too.
    I actually didn’t think too much about it besides the half-formulated thought that “Gosh, Anne is really being pretty blatant with her phone,” but that must be why I glanced at her screen, something that (I swear) I don’t normally do.
    And I really really really wish I hadn’t this time, because what I saw was…part of a sexting message. I looked away two seconds later and made sure I didn’t look again, but what I saw in that 2-second period was about half of a sentence that was really quite explicit about…about her…arousal.
    Aaaauuugh! My eyes, my eyes!
    To make it worse, she was the sort of person who *always* talked about it when she had a boyfriend, I knew she had broken up with her most recent boyfriend some time previously and she hadn’t mentioned a new one, so this was clearly not a boyfriend. This was just some guy (or woman – who knows?) Anne – who was in other ways quite prim and proper, and who spent most of her time baking and canning (at least that’s what she talked about all the time) – was sexting with some guy. At a staff meeting. While surrounded by 50-plus coworkers.
    She left the company a couple of years later, and I only see her on Facebook these days, but I never have entirely got over it. Anne. Discussing her sexual arousal with someone who was not a spouse or romantic partner. At a staff meeting. Maybe she just needed a little pick-me-up to counter those pre-lunch doldrums?

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      Is she related to the person from today’s first letter, who has their lock screen set to random porn?

      1. KayDeeAye*

        That’s what reminded me of this event! Though I probably would have thought of it anyway – as I said, I never really got over it.

    2. Mortified,*

      Many years ago, when I was an 18 year old shift worker in a virtual office, I and a fellow 18 year old who were the only people on nights may have done the deed on a conference room table. I may have then participated in similar messages with the person when I was next at a meeting in that conference room.

      I am horrified with myself, delighted that it pre-dated social media, most phone cameras and routine CCTV in office buildings. I still cringe inside out thinking about it.

    3. JustaTech*

      One time I was at a conference where we sat at tables rather than in rows of chairs (it was nice because you had somewhere to put your notebook and coffee).
      I had noticed throughout the conference that people were actually paying attention to the speakers and weren’t on their phones the whole time (yay confident public speakers).
      But now it was the last talk, and everyone was tired/ getting ready to leave, and people were on their phones. The woman next to me was on Bumble, which felt a little weird at like 2 in the afternoon, but hey, I wasn’t really paying attention either.

    4. Katydid*

      When I was still on the apps, there were a few guys I talked with who either had different schedules or had days off during the week and they would send the most inappropriate things. I would think “oh how nice, he’s texting me to chat over lunch” and I quickly learned that was not the case and to not open those text messages in view of any co-workers.

  25. Seashell*

    I didn’t share a desk, but at a prior hybrid job, someone had used my office on a day when I was working at home. I came in to find a used tissue left on my desk near the keyboard. I’m pretty non-germphobic, but that was gross enough that I complained to my supervisor.

  26. Somehow I Manage*

    This isn’t quite the same, but a few times when I was a teenager and early college, I covered the store when a friend who owned it had to be out of town. Yes, I was paid.

    This is a dear friend who I love very much, but readers, he was, at the time, a SLOB. I should have counted the number of empty soda cans and bottles I had to move from his desk just so I could sit and surf the internet. Wrappers of all kinds, too. If memory serves, I think I filled up an entire gigantic trash bag with the refuse and set it in the back room. It probably took an hour. Great guy…just didn’t do a fantastic job cleaning up after himself.

  27. Packaged Frozen Lemon Zest*

    At my previous company our office space was built almost entirely out of glass, metal, and faux-quartz surfaces and was essentially a sound transmitting nightmare: glass walls, metal hardware, quartzite desks, even the floors were super hard, super thin “carpet” squares. The conference rooms had sliding glass doors that did not fully seal. The “desks” were actually long tables that had low (glass) dividers between people facing each other but not between each individual station. Many of the people I worked with had meeting-intensive and call-intensive roles, and when they weren’t in meetings or calls liked to review their work product out loud with each other. Even with noise-cancelling headphones I had to play white noise constantly or I would literally be unable to hear myself think. By far the loudest place I have ever worked and one upshot of the pandemic was that I got a break from the overwhelming din.

  28. still a student*

    I wrote in a friday thread a year and a half ago about my officemate in my grad student office who I was pretty sure was living there… turns out, he was. 7 days a week. He’d work nights and sleep on our office couch during the day (and sleep talk to me…). He’s a really messy guy too. Old milk cartons on his shelves, trash everywhere in his corner. I have no idea how there was no pest problem. There is a shower in the building at least. I had a hard time saying something because I was sort of convinced he was homeless (PhD stipend isn’t great), and our faculty do not believe in confidentiality and rumors spread pretty fast. His advisor saw our office all the time and didn’t do anything, so I was worried about causing drama. Eventually found out he does have an apartment, two blocks from campus! Tried talking to him about it nicely a few times and got nowhere…but eventually I put my foot down when we got a third officemate and I told him he had to get it together, because this wasn’t a fair way to treat a shared space. I also would leave the door wide open during the day because I’m petty. He no longer lives in the office :)

    1. not a student anymore*

      omg, flashback to my grad school days… at one point I was sharing an office with a visiting student (English was not his first language, so there were linguistic and cultural differences that probably exacerbated the situation more than it should have). He’d sit in our shared office and do this hacking throat-clearing cough like every 20 seconds. He’d bring lunch and microwave it (so it smelled) and then slurp it loudly at his desk. I wasn’t sure he was sufficiently bathing or doing laundry… there were a lot of smells and sounds all around, which were unavoidable (you can avert your eyes, but not avert your nose) and made it extremely hard to concentrate and it got worse the longer it went on. I tried shifting my hours to come in later nights/weekends: he was ALWAYS THERE.

      I didn’t know what to do and felt bad complaining but eventually I went to the ombuds who quickly made a call and got the offices switched around. Fortunately I didn’t have any issues with subsequent officemates. Yay ombuds.

      1. Yaya*

        Ahhh PhD offices are such a gamble! In our PhD office spaces, I shared an office with three other really lovely people. We shared a kitchen with a few other shared office rooms. A message was posted in the kitchen that asked people to please stop defecating in bags and putting it in the kitchen bin.

        OMG.

        Eventually we think we figured out who it was (someone down the hall who was there A LOT), but the weird thing is that there was absolutely a toilet on that floor. Whyyy the bags?!

    2. Raida*

      One of my mates realised at her law firm there was a person living there, but it took *ages* to figure out because he was clean and tidy.

      Also, to support those crazy long hours expected in the first year or two at the firm for new graduates, there were beds and kitchens and end of trip facilities and a gym – so it wasn’t odd for someone to sleep there, be there overnight, etc.

      But yeah, apparently he was homeless for a good four and a half months! And then, with the money saved by not paying rent or buying groceries, or commuting… he had like 20 grand saved.

  29. Orchestral Musician*

    I worked a part-time job in higher ed for a while where I shared an office with a woman who would repeatedly bike to work, come in, and immediately spray her pits with deodorant IN THE SHARED OFFICE, about three feet away from my own desk. Why would you not use the bathroom?! I probably should have said something. I did occasionally put on an N95 mask when she did this but she didn’t take the hint.

    1. Bike Walk Bake Books*

      Good grief. I bike to work and find it far more helpful to put the deodorant or anti-perspirant on before I start to sweat, not after. But I have an e-bike now so sweat is minimal.

  30. ghostlight*

    I currently work at a large theatre complex, and our previous CEO still ‘consults’ here, and has a very nice private office that is his. He is maybe in the office one or two days a week. We also have this older woman who is quite eccentric and handles our archives. She’s volunteered here for a very long time, and one day I walked by the previous CEO’s office right as she was exiting it… and he was not in that day. The office is fully empty, lights off, etc. I gave her kind of a quizzical look, and she explains to me that she often eats lunch in his office since, (and I’m quoting here), “It’s such a waste for a nice office to have no one in it.” I was so surprised I didn’t really respond, and to my knowledge, he has no idea she’s borrowing his office when he’s not there as her own personal cafeteria.

    1. still a student*

      I’m kind of obsessed with the volunteer using the ‘consulting’ former ceo’s office. I too hope to be an eccentric older woman someday

  31. Jaid*

    The hook for my sweater kept disappearing. Not the sweater, the hook. Finally, I put white out on the last hook and wrote a curse on the back of it. I mean, I was super annoyed and didn’t think anything more that maybe it’ll make whoever is doing it have a second thought.

    It turns out that my G-d fearing Southern Baptist nightshift partner was removing the hook because it was on “her” side of the cubicle wall and she took that curse to EO and filed a complaint.

    I would come to the desk with a statute of the Virgin Mary and a palm cross attached to the wall, plus a calendar with notations of my misdeeds.

    There was some other crap going on with her, like trying to get me moved, but she went outside the chain of command and that pissed the DM off. She finally got her own cubicle, bless her heart.

    2. I Have RBF*

      I would come to the desk with a statute of the Virgin Mary and a palm cross attached to the wall, plus a calendar with notations of my misdeeds.

      Grrrrrr! I would have pointedly trashed that stuff, and replaced the calendar with one featuring black cats or something. I get very, very mean when people try to shove their religious crap on me.

  32. Bast*

    I guess not exactly “shared” desk, but at Old Job, the receptionist was responsible for opening the mail, scanning it into the appropriate file, and alerting whoever was assigned to that file. Occasionally, someone else would have to sit at the front desk to cover her lunch or when she was out sick. One day when she was out sick, the person who was covering opened a desk drawer to find stacks and stacks of unopened, unscanned mail. Apparently, she was picking and choosing what to scan and just hiding the rest when she didn’t feel like scanning it. She had other performance issues, but this one was a shocker at the sheer amount of mail that she had accumulated. This wasn’t being a day or two behind on the mail; it was clear that it had been going on for quite awhile. It was a nightmare trying to catch up, and you had everyone from paralegals to attorneys scanning mail for the better part of a week trying to catch up.

    2. The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon*

      Did she get fired for it? I hope so, but if this site has taught me anything, it’s how many people don’t get fired no matter what.

      1. Bast*

        This job hated firing anyone, and in fact, only fired one person the entire time I was there for no call, no showing for days. You could get into fights with colleagues, show up hours late, tell your boss you didn’t feel like doing the work assigned, watch music videos all day, the list goes on, but apparently the line was drawn at no call no showing.

        This person left shortly after of her own accord.

  33. Alan*

    Not actually a horror story but we did some hiring during covid and when the company started talking about bringing people back in person with desk-sharing, a new member of my team that I had never met in person started talking over Zoom about how she’d hate sharing a desk with some giant, having to lower her chair every day, etc. It was fun being my 6’9″ self to her when we finally met in person :-).

    1. mreasy*

      I worked at a company that brought on a bunch of new people during covid lockdown. When we had our first in-person gathering, I was surprised by so many people’s heights!

  34. Charlotte Lucas*

    This was a temporary shared situation, but when I worked in Customer Service, I handled a specialty line, so if I was in training, someone had to sit at my desk in case there was a call. These trainings never lasted more than an hour or so. Yet I would come back to the settings completely changed on my system.

  35. Wallaby, Well I'll Be*

    Oh lord, my boss informed my team just yesterday that the 5 of us are losing our individual desks, and will be limited to one floating desk. This is mostly fine, as we are remote 90% of the time. But there are definitely weeks where we need to be in the office, and the chaos of figuring out where to put our things and actually work will really be something to behold. Thankfully, none of us are slobs, and we all like each other and are friends outside of work.

    At a previous job, I was the only one on my team that had a desk, because I was also doing some graphic design work in addition to the manual labor stuff my team did. Because of this, my desk was literally the only desk in our big work area, so when I wasn’t around, people would sit there. When I came in on Monday, it was always trashed. But the worst part was that someone was going into my drawers and eating the mixed nuts I kept in there. Thankfully, I had a key for the drawer, and just started locking it. The audacity!

    1. Paint N Drip*

      Changing settings and leaving things messy is rude and sloppy, but eating someone’s snacks (and I assume like BULK snacks, so their hands are in it??) is just anti-social! Shouldn’t HAVE to use that key but I’m glad it was there and you did

  36. Maria*

    The worst for me was that my company decided that all of us being in the same room and able to move around to different seats (although all were in use during the day) magically meant that we would all knowledge share. No need to set up meetings or structure or arrange anything.

    It didn’t work for me, since I don’t talk out loud about whatever I happen to be working on, so that the synergy in the room could hear it and provide me with answers.

  37. EngGirl*

    My first job ever when I was 15 was to work in my town’s tourism office over the summer. I would get in at 8 and man the desk and then I would be joined by a rotation of elderly volunteers who would come in around 10. I had been raised in a “take care of your elders” house, and I was getting paid while these people were volunteering. So naturally I would do my best to take care of answering the phone, handling visitors when they came in, and filling in wherever I could. I thought I was killing it.

    Then one day one of the volunteers, Agnes, absolutely lost it on me. She started screaming that I was making them feel useless and that I shouldn’t be taking their jobs and just doing things on “the machine” (the machine was what she called the computer. This was like 2006). My boss pulled me to the side and basically told me to go hang in her office while she calmed Agnes down, and she’d figure something out.

    Unfortunately there were no other workspaces. So for the rest of the summer whenever Agnes was there I had to sit in a chair behind where the volunteers were sitting and basically just watch while Agnes answered the phone and repeatedly hung up on calls because “there was no one there” despite being able to clearly hear the person on the other end of the phone from 5 ft away. At the time it was mortifying and I cried a lot. Now it’s absolutely hilarious.

  38. Eli*

    I shared an office with 4 other instructors as a graduate student instructor. One of my office mates regularly left trash inside of the shared desk drawers. Our office didn’t have a trash can, so he also brought in a box and basically started collecting trash there even though there was a trash and recycling bin immediately outside of our office door and by the elevator. I ended up meeting with students outside or at a cafe most of the time.

  39. NothingIsLittle*

    I was sharing an office that had been converted from a meeting room with three coworkers, so it was suboptimally designed for us at best. It was worse than that, though, because our roles required a lot of materials and all of them were required to be stored in our space. The result was that the room was packed nearly floor to ceiling, with a tiny walking path to the desks that were also stacked tall with crap that we needed but couldn’t store.

    There were many proposed solutions, like a storage unit or converting another room into storage for my team, but since we were the only ones impacted, nothing ever changed. It got packed even tighter after I left and there were 4 more sq feet for storage.

  40. SmackingNeighbor*

    I shared a desk with a coworker who snacked all day, which would have been fine except he smacked his food. It was loud, open-mouth chewing all day everyday. It was bad enough that other coworkers were grossed out too, but I bore the brunt of it as the desk mate.

    We never came up with a way to address the chomping conundrum head on. The closest we ever got was a coworker saying “wow, that sounds *lip-smacking* good!” once, but he missed the hint and merrily offered to share his tasty snack.

    1. Arrietty*

      Why did you not say “hey Boris, would you mind eating a little more quietly? It’s a bit distracting!”?

      1. Mentally Spicy*

        Right? They “never came up with a way of addressing it head on”. How about … just addressing it head on? How does that not occur to people? Instead their solution is making passive-aggressive comments in the hope they take the hint.

        Humans are weird.

  41. I don't work in this van*

    This wasn’t shared space by permission, but at an old old job, someone would go into another person’s office to have phone sex with their long-distance boyfriend. I think she thought because it had walls, it was “private,” but the walls did not go all the way up to the ceiling, the office had a big window into the shared space, and, oh yeah, IT WAS SOMEONE ELSE’S OFFICE.

      1. Zona the Great*

        You know, I’d probably pound on the wall from the other side like I would a noisy neighbor. I’d do this to the bathroom masterbater too. Just knock hard the the stall wall every time it happened. We shouldn’t be exposed to other peoples’ sex acts.

  42. ChurchOfDietCoke*

    I’m a trainer, so when I go to my workplace I am usually in a training room, and when I need to do admin / design etc I work from home, therefore I’m so rarely in the actual office that I don’t have an allocated desk. However, a few weeks ago I needed to do some admin work at a desk, so popped up to the office and plonked myself down at a spare one, connected my laptop to the screen and then realised there were no fewer than FIVE keyboards and SEVEN mice scattered all over the desk. Apparently people don’t like to share…

    1. KoolKat*

      Damn right I’ve got my own mouse and keyboard for when I’m in the office! But I put it away in the cupboard whenever I’m done, I don’t leave it on the desk. It would get used and broken or go missing if I did!

    2. I Have RBF*

      I never use office mice unless I’m literally at someone else’s desk showing them something. I bring my own trackball and take it home with me if I can’t lock it up. I also have a travel keyboard, with case, too.

  43. Emily Byrd Starr*

    This isn’t quite a “shared desk” story, but it is adjacent enough to be on topic.
    I’ll never forget the time when I was on my work computer, and discovered that one of the previous Google searches was “Chinese text translator,” which was not something I had searched for. In fact, I saw it in more than one website on my computer. This was not a computer that I shared with anyone else, and it was password protected. I worked part-time, so I asked my full-time coworkers if they had seen anyone else using my computer when I wasn’t there. They said no, and asked me if perhaps I had forgotten to log off the day before, and I said no, I had to log in that day. So how could someone else possibly have known my password and logged in to my computer? For that matter, why were they using my computer instead of their own? One coworker suggested that perhaps the cleaning staff had been using my computer, but it still didn’t explain how they were able to log in (or, for that matter, why they needed to use my computer).
    I never found out the answer to this mystery.

    2. Safely Retired*

      Having to log in the next morning doesn’t mean you didn’t necessarily log off. Whoever used it could have logged it off after they were done.

      1. kalli*

        Windows also loves to kick people out and restart to finish updates when it thinks it’s a quiet time.

      2. Emily Byrd Starr*

        It still doesn’t explain why they used my computer and not their own. Everyone who worked there had their own computer.

  44. Road Tripper*

    Shared spaces are a bit more common in my realm. In one former department, I had come into the office a bit late. As I am walking to my desk there is W, calmly trimming his TOE nails with his feet propped up on the desk. His response to my baffled look was, “Well, it’s got to get done sometime.” We do field work with steel toe boot requirements.

  45. Nev*

    Back when I worked in a call center, part-time people used the unoccupied desks of full-time employees when they weren’t there. One night, I get to the desk I’m supposed to use for the night, and as I’m getting set up, I notice a picture of a tightly swaddled baby.

    A tightly swaddled STILLBORN baby.

    I very carefully covered the picture with a catalog. Every time I saw a PT employee using that desk, the photo was covered up. I empathize with the FT employee – I can’t imagine the utter heartbreak of losing a child – but I question the logic of putting up a post-mortem photo of that child in a very public, very shared space.

    1. Hey there*

      That is soooo incredibly sad! They clearly weren’t working with logic at the time, just pain and grief.

  46. Badger*

    When I was hired on at a small social enterprise my desk was pushed up against my boss’s desk, back-to-back. It meant that we sat directly facing each other all day. I’m a tidy person and never have clutter on my desk, while my boss was a borderline hoarder. She had multiple towers of loose papers, at least 15 tchotchkes and an extensive nature collection that included feathers, skulls, and a dried bear poop that she liked because it had seeds in it. There was almost no visible desk surface. Within a day her clutter had crept over the border and onto my desk. I ignored it, but the flow was unstoppable. By Day 3 the slow-moving landslide of junk had taken over the back third of my desk. Since she wasn’t in that day to talk to her, I took all her junk off my desk and neatly piled it back on hers. The next morning she profusely apologized and said she would be more mindful, while commenting on how tidy and sterile my desk was. This became a pattern: throughout the workday a paper stack would be nudged onto my desk, or an animal bone would fall from an overflowing basket onto my printer. I started propping up items to create a fence on the border, à la Dwight Schrute. Several times I politely talked to her about needing my desk to be free of clutter. Nothing worked. Every afternoon after she left I would remove her items and neatly stack them back on her desk. Every morning she would apologize and continue the pattern. I could see her shame growing. About a year later we moved into a new “office” that she had built which was a log cabin with no indoor plumbing, heating or cooling. There was an outhouse with no running water. I quit a few months later.

    1. JustaTech*

      Oh my goodness, no!

      Years ago my husband and I were re-designing our shared home office. He came up with this lovely design that would make the most of the small space, and we could both have bigger desks!
      It was our two desks pushed up against each other in the middle of the room.

      I looked at my desk, piled with stuff (at least no dead animals?), and his much less cluttered desk and said “this is the worst idea ever and you would hate me in a week.”

      We did not reorganize our office and when we moved we got separate office spaces so my clutter doesn’t have to bother anyone else.

    2. Raida*

      That’s so sad, she does sound like a hoarder by the shame.

      However it does remind me of a workmate who bought garden edging that looked like a picket fence, and superglued it to the edges of her desk! She *said* to was to have a homey feel awwww but it was really to stop shit sliding into her space anymore. She added just a few fake plants to make it look like the ‘garden’ was actually important lol

  47. Nannerdoodle*

    At my first job out of college, I worked in a lab. We all had desks in the office but were basically only there to eat lunch. I worked first shift and shared my desk with someone who worked second shift who was a known food mooch. I liked to bake, and he’d request that I save an item that I brought in for my team in a specific desk drawer so he could have one later. That was fine when there were extras. It turns out he’d also use that drawer to stash food that he’d take from meetings he wasn’t in. As in, he’d walk into a meeting with food, take a bunch of it, and stash it in the desk to eat when he had time. But he consistently forgot about the food because we were always in lab most of the day/night. I’d get to my desk some mornings to the smell of yesterday’s chipotle, bbq, or pizza. The worst was when a team had a breakfast potluck and he left a plate of pancakes and syrup in the drawer that spilled on everything. I used that incident to ask for a new desk that was not shared, and my request was granted.

    1. JustaTech*

      I used to have a coworker who would stop at Subway every morning on his walk to work and buy a tuna sub, and then put it in his desk drawer.
      We had a nice, clean, office fridge with plenty of space for his tuna sandwich, but no, he wanted it nice and room temperature in his drawer.

      Amazingly he never got sick from it, but when he left we got out the serious lab cleaner to clean out the drawer.

  48. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    I mean, being in IT for this many decades I’ve got some fairly horrific stories of Things Found On Shared Computers but I don’t think you want to hear about those, so from my funny archives:

    Person A reports computer is running really slowly, and it’s a computer used in a 24/7 depot so is hardly ever rebooted. I remote in, and that alone takes the computer over 10 minutes to accept!

    Once finally in I find the most bizarre animated desktop I’ve ever seen. Think visual representation of a migraine, epileptic seizure and hangover all in one. I delve deeper (after finding the unauthorised program running that all and shutting it down) and find so, so many animated gifs, animated toolbars (again, unauthorised) and an absolute crapton of games like Minecraft, Barbie, Sims, all that stuff. Removed them all and the computer ran fine.

    I never found out how those GOT onto the computer. This was in a 24/7 engineering depot where NO kids are ever allowed. Whoever did it knew enough IT to know how to get around our active directory permissions…

    1. Chauncy Gardener*

      I really really want to hear about the things you found on shared computers someday.
      I remember my old IT guy (Vietnam vet, so had Seen Things) a gazillion years ago who was traumatized by what he found on our CEO’s computer…..yech

  49. NotHannah*

    My first real job after college was at a small weekly newspaper. My predecessor had been a guy with a habit of chewing … wax lips, a kind of candy popular in the 1970s. One desk drawer was filled with them.
    Many years later, I was hired by a university for a director-level position. My division shared space with another division – and the two divisions had a rivalry. There was no a work station for me for, oh, about the first four weeks. There was a computer in the lunch room that seemingly nobody used, so I got permission to camp out there. (They also didn’t have any work for me to do, but that’s another story.) I was told to “read the website.” I was kicked out of the lunchroom computer when it became known that it was for the rival division’s interns. The rival division had been incensed when they came into the lunchroom and saw me using “their” computer. There was much talk of this being a deliberate act. I had no clue what was happening. I was so happy when I finally got my own work station, but that ended up being the most toxic work environment I had ever been in.

  50. Ashley Armbruster*

    Years ago I had a boss (open office layout) who would clip her nails at her desk…..my coworker friend (who sat a few rows down) could hear it and asked me about it. LOL

    [insert cringe face gif]

  51. They Call Me Patricia*

    I shared a cubicle with a coworker for a full year, and she whistled All. The. Time. It was a literal constant stream of whistling while she worked. She only stopped if she was on the phone or speaking to someone. At first I thought it must be an unconscious habit, but when I gently pointed it out, she cheerfully replied, “Oh, yeah, I know I’m doing that!” And to make matters worse, it was the same tune every day – Entry of The Gladiators, AKA the tune we think of as circus/clown music. The only time she changed it up was in December, when she switched to Jingle Bells. It was a long year.

  52. ragazza*

    This wasn’t me, but a coworker years ago: there was one employee who was known for terrible personal hygiene that he had to share a desk with. He said the chair smelled, and he actually kept an extra phone handset for his own personal use because the shared phone would smell. But there was something worse–here’s your warning to scroll down now to avoid something REALLY GROSS.

    He found a paper in the desk that the guy saved his boogers on. No, I don’t know why he saved them or why he didn’t use a kleenex. I still get nauseous thinking about this decades later.

  53. Post Morbus*

    I once worked in a small office that I shared with another woman. We had a table behind us and our desks in front of us. Part of our work was done on the tables, part at our desk so naturally we would just roll our office chairs back and forth depending on the task. Unfortunately, this woman wore super skimpy outfits and NO UNDERWEAR. So every time she would scoot her boot back and forth, I got a flash of her goods à la Basic Instinct. I ended up having to go to my boss and she spoke with HR.

  54. Art3mis*

    In college I was a section editor on the newspaper staff. We had a small office, so everyone had to share their desks with someone else. I agreed to share mine with another editor I’d become friendly with. Unfortunately, I soon found out that he was a slob. And I say that as someone who is not the neatest or most organized person. I can put up with a lot of mess. But he left just filth and squalor all over not just his side of the desk but my side as well. I repeatedly asked him to clean it up and he didn’t and wouldn’t. He didn’t even see it as a problem, he even said it was my problem and if I wanted it cleaned up, I could do it. So I finally put all of his stuff, even things that weren’t garbage, in a garbage bag and left it on his side of the desk for him to deal with. Which he did after several weeks. But at least I didn’t have to work around piles of paper and empty food wrappers.

  55. Zona the Great*

    Mine is a little different. I was a “rover” at a bank where I was sent to new branches every day to cover for absences. Basically a substitute bank teller and banker. One branch had a plant care service where these people would come in and tend to the plants which were, I guess, part of a contracted service. They’d water them, trim leaves, polish leaves, etc. They silently entered offices to avoid bothering the bankers. I was sitting in a lady’s office working when a plant lady stormed in pointing to a plant and demanding to know where it came from and that it wasn’t their plant and they don’t care for unauthorized plants. I shrugged and told her this isn’t my office nor is this my branch. I’m just sitting here for now. She came back at least twice more to actually reprimand me, essentially her company’s client, and demand answers. It was the strangest thing to happen to me up to that point. I left a note for the plant owner that she had better watch her back with these plant ladies.

    1. Unauthorized Plants*

      I’ve been unable to come up with a fun name here until now. I have been inspired. Thank you!

    2. JustaTech*

      Oh, we had a company like that too, and I guess we leased the plants from them or something, because personal plants were completely Forbidden.
      But then money got tight and we got rid of the leased plants and plant care folks, but didn’t change the rules on personal plants.
      So several of my coworkers got fish.

  56. SpinsterNonsense*

    When I first started my last job, it was more a filing/copying/on your feet type of job. But when they figured out I could be useful in other ways, they set me up in an office that wasn’t used a ton. That office happened to belong to the head elected official of the town I worked for, who was only in office at most an hour a day. But they didn’t want me to share her desk, so they put me and a very old (even for 2002 standards) desktop computer at a card table (it sagged under its weight) and a 1950s style office chair. We later moved and sold a lot of that furniture and my parents still own that chair. It is surprisingly comfortable. The folding table somehow got slashed in the move and never made it to my temporary space. It wasn’t tremendously missed.

  57. Badger*

    I thought of another horror story. I worked as a 911 dispatcher for a year, pre-covid. There were multiple identical workstations and staff rotated around as people went on breaks or came on/off shift. Each workstation had 1 headset, so if you were relieving a dispatcher for their lunch break, they’d take the headset off their ears and you would have to put the still-warm, potentially greasy headset over your ears. It was so gross! Somehow nobody thought to get some Lysol wipes. In the years after I left, my dispatcher friend told me that people were assigned their own personal headsets and it resolved the issue.

  58. Zyzzx*

    The setting: trailer on a construction site. The players: a female employee who primarily used the desk (one of two females on the site) and thirty or so male employees who occasionally needed a desk to fill out some paperwork or do a training.
    The problem: the primary desk user’s office supplies continually going missing from the desk, despite the office supply cabinet being a mere ten steps away.
    The solution: move the personal office supplies to the back of the drawer and put a handful of (unused, wrapped) tampons in the front. It’s juvenile but it worked for many of them!

    2. Dinwar*

      When my wife was a field worker she carried pink tools with her for that reason. Normal tools often went missing–it was pretty normal to share tools while on the job, and just as normal to “forget” to give them back. But there’s not a driller on Earth who’s going to steal a pink screwdriver or hammer!

      I did see it backfire. There was one site that handed out pink hardhats to people who forgot their PPE. One person asked where they got them. The next Monday she rolled in with a pink, bedazzled hardhat, her name written in rhinestones! (Yes, we got a lecture about not putting stickers on hard hats. By a guy who had his training stickers covering 80% of the surface of his. He did not make a convincing argument.)

    3. goddessoftransitory*

      Hah, I had a coworker back in the day who’d do that to reserve a certain locker she liked. Guys would recoil like it was a rattlesnake instead of a cardboard box of Feminine Hygiene Product.

  59. RLC*

    Years ago worked in very overcrowded office (think two people assigned to each standard desk facing each other, desks set up in supply room and office library, people with only a table and no desk). I shared a table-as-desk in the library, which also had a full time librarian (3 employees in room).
    Librarian sold cosmetics from her desk, frequently spraying fragrance into the shared air; the mix of lingering scents was nauseating.
    One day, apropos of nothing, my desk mate calmly announced to us that he was a warlock who could control the forces of nature. It took all my energy in that moment to not ask him why he wasn’t taking action on the forest fire raging and threatening hundreds of homes in the mountains near our town.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      I feel like the best way to react to that is to act as if he just announced his golf score or what crochet pattern he’d picked for his next socks. “Oh really? That’s nice. Are you done with the TPS reports?”

      1. RLC*

        That essentially was my response, “oh, ok, do you know if the printer has my map done?” or something similarly bland.
        Working there built my skills for “low level reaction to startling statements”. I’ve been asked so many unexpected/outrageous/just plain odd questions by both colleagues and clients in my career that I could write a book.

  60. A large cage of birds*

    I worked in an open office where we all had our own “cubes” which is a term I use pretty generously because they were mostly open. The cubes around me were empty, but the one next to me was a fairly popular spot for visitors to sit down and have a desk for a bit. This was usually fine but one frequent visitor would always take loud video conference calls without headphones. Not a care in the world for how loud he was or the conversations that didn’t need to be broadcast to anyone walking by.

  61. Hotdog not dog*

    I worked in an office that ran out of space, so they started doubling/tripling up while they were doing some renovations to “optimize the space.” Optimization apparently meant redecorating the CEOs office and converting a storage closet by installing a long counter top along the side and squeezing in 5 chairs, shoulder to shoulder. As a bonus, that “office” shared an uninsulated wall with the men’s restroom. We heard every sound. Not coincidentally, that was when I implemented a personal policy to never shake hands with any of my colleagues!

  62. Hotdesking at Home*

    When I set up my thought-it-would-be-temporary home workspace five years ago, I grabbed a swivel chair that we used with one of the home computers. One of our cats liked to sleep in this chair, but there was a second, identical chair in that room, so I figured she’d sleep there instead.

    No. She has not forgotten that I took HER chair. Despite it being in a completely different room, she still wants to use it. Sometimes she will wait impatiently for the work day to end so she can take it back over, shuffling around and glaring at me while I finish things up. Sometimes I will walk up in the morning and find her curled up in it, giving me a look of “eff you, human, this spot is taken today.”

    2. OneLuckyDuck*

      Why, oh why haven’t you swapped the chairs back properly! It’s been FIVE YEARS, give the kitty her chair back already! Meanie. ;-)

  63. DeeDee*

    My story is about sharing my desk across two buildings. I once worked for a film festival; it was normal office work until the time of the festival, where they relocated a lot of our operations to the building where the festival HQ was, which was not our regular office. My actual physical desk got moved to the new location, but my computer (my desktop computer tower, with wired monitor, keyboard, etc.) stayed in our office. At one point I had to go do something on my actual computer and I had to sit on the floor, propping the monitor up on an empty box to work.

  64. HalesBopp*

    This is a bit of an offshoot of this topic, but it still makes me laugh – Once upon a time, I was working out of a space we called the “cloffice,” for the closet office. My team had a very large storage closet in the building which had a table with a couple of chairs. It was quieter and more private than the actual drop down area, so it is where I, and occasionally other colleagues, worked on my in office days. The “cloffice” was the exclusive storage space for our grant-funded program. All of our program’s office supplies were purchased separate from those of the general office, as our supply needs were unique to our program (think things like different colored printer paper, special markers, etc.). I unfortunately missed the drama, but my coworker was in the cloffice one day when a staff person she didn’t know unlocked the door. Our team was small and were generally good about communicating our in office time, so it was startling to say the least. This person came in and started to take supplies. When my coworker asked what the heck she was doing, this staff responded that this was her program’s storage closet. My coworker informed this staff that, no, this was exclusively our department’s storage closet, paid for by grant funds. The staff shrugged and said she had been told to get supplies out of this closet.

    This launched an email chain to end all email chains between our program’s manager, the manager of the other staff’s program, and the office manager. My manager was furious because it appeared that this other program had been pilfering supplies for months. She demanded that the office be rekeyed so that it could not be accessed by anyone other than our team. The other manager stated that our cloffice is where his team’s office supplies had been placed during a move, and that we couldn’t deny them access! The office manager was finally able to connect the dots and informed the other manager that his team’s supplies had been placed in a cabinet in their drop down space, which was labeled “Other Team’s Supplies,” in the area where his team was working every day . . . He said he would let his team know, but that he still didn’t see what the big deal was.

    While the office was not rekeyed, the next time I went in, there was a huge sign on the door of the cloffice which read “MY DEPARTMENT SUPPLY CLOSET – DO NOT ACCESS.” We have always wondered how long the other team had been stealing supplies from us – we didn’t have a staff in the cloffice everyday, so there’s truly no telling. But if we had not been using the closet as a shared office space, they may have never been caught!

    1. Lady Ann*

      I used to have a job where I was contracted to provide services in a school. I wasn’t a school employee, but worked in the same space in the school every day. My job required some materials so I had a shelf and a table to work on. One day I was working and a random first grader wandered in and started taking tissues out of the tissue box on my table. I asked the kid what he was doing and he said his teacher had directed him to come into my space and take the tissues because they were out in their classroom. (Tissues not being supplied by the school, it was either the teachers or families that supplied them, and this school was in a high poverty area.) I didn’t want to get mad at the kid for doing what his teacher told him, but I couldn’t believe that the teacher’s solution was to send her student in to take the tissues I had bought with my own money! I asked her about it later and she said “oh, sorry, I didn’t realize” but since, as I said, the school didn’t supply tissues, she KNEW that they were bought by someone with their own funds.

  65. 653-CXK*

    At ExJob, upper management began to approve WFH after the harsh winter of 2015. Hence, those who wanted to WFH lost their physical desks and had to hotdesk when they came to the office.

    You could reserve a hot desk anywhere in the two buildings, and do so at least a week or two in advance. (My personal preference: the first and second floors of the main building, right near the bus stop.) When I had to have one-on-ones with my supervisor, I hotdesked in the small building.

    I worked in a production and quality scheme, but I only worked from home two days a week, so I reserved my three days and that was it. Those with stellar production and quality stats could work from home five days per week and not even step into the office for months at a time…until management announced there would be all-staff meetings.

    All staff meetings required people to come in to the office, after a disastrous attempt for people to call in from home. As soon as the admin made the announcement, all of the prime spots in the smaller building would be gone in less than five minutes, thus relegating some people to the main building. There would be numerous “hey, I reserved this spot!” sorties afterwards, but then things would get back to semi-normal.

    My last day of hotdesking at ExJob was when I was let go. I came in the usual time, and found someone in the spot I reserved. No problem – I was able to find one within five minutes and decamp there. About 90 minutes later, as I was working, I got the tap on the shoulder from my supervisor to meet with my manager and an HR representative – the former to announce my services were no longer required, and the latter to hand me my final check. Thankfully, I was allowed to leave my laptop there and collect the other things I had. (I don’t think they heard my Braveheart shout as I left the campus grounds for the final time.)

    At CurrentJob, there is no hotdesking, but where I WFH five days a week, the desks are open to whoever’s there first. If both desks are occupied, I’ll work in the small break room. No muss, no fuss, and sometimes I’ll split my time between the office and home, stopping for lunch on the way back.

  66. nora*

    I moved departments, from Dept A that handled extremely confidential information, to Dept B that handled completely different extremely confidential information. Separate phone systems, separate databases, never the twain shall meet. In Dept A I had an assigned desk and a landline phone that also rang to my computer. In Dept B I had no assigned desk and thus no assigned hardphone. I kept the same phone number. Apparently it never occurred to the IT team that they needed to disconnect the landline from the softphone. For months after I moved to Dept B I got calls intended for Dept A, but often the callers didn’t know exactly what they were calling about so it would take a while to figure out that they needed to hang up and call the other number. Also, for some reason, the landline I used to have was assigned to both my softphone and the one belonging to the person who took over my old cube, so that person got calls for me too. It was a completely bizarre situation. Apparently in the entire history of the employer, I was only the second or third person to transfer from Dept A to another department and there just weren’t any protocols to handle it.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      I worked for a company that thought it would be Fun and Hip to give employees email addresses with just their first names (e.g. bob@company.com). As the company grew, it became a symbol of tenure (or an uncommon first name), since whichever Bob had been at the company the longest would get the bob@company.com email address. Then, when they left, the email address went to the next-longest-tenured Bob, wherever in the company they worked. Cute tradition, right?

      We worked with PHI.

  67. Anonymouse*

    Years ago, I worked at an office where most of us were in the field all day, and we shared two desktop computers for data entry, payroll, and other admin tasks.

    One of my coworkers was zealous about cyber security, so he updated the desktops to set very secure passwords (long strings of letters, numbers, and special characters).

    Unfortunately that meant that none of us could remember the passwords, so they were written on post-it notes taped to the desks (very secure!). The real trouble began when he transferred to another office and one of the post-its was lost. I don’t know if anyone was ever able to log into the data entry computer again.

  68. Librariannie*

    I work in public libraries, and my first management job was as a branch manager. The former manager had apparently been obsessive about his fingernails, and when I was putting things in my new desk, I discovered that there were nail clippers and emery filing boards in every single drawer, along with the… remnants… of his clippings. I mean there had to have been at least 15 different nail clippers in there of various sizes (small child-size clippers, the big ones for toenails, and other accoutrements). I remember gasping in horror; I didn’t know up until that point how grossed out I would be by the idea of someone clipping their nails in public, but it was like a new phobia unlocked itself that day. I used paper towels to pick up all the clippers and clippings and throw them away, then Clorox-wiped the inside of the desk over and over to make sure there weren’t any bits left floating around. Why are people so disgusting??

    1. another librarian*

      I ALSO once started a library job and found the bottom drawer full of…clippings, but this wins.

  69. KoolKat*

    Not particularly exciting, but we have a bank of shared desks which aren’t actually general-use hot desks, but hot desks specific to our team. However, as we’re often out and about supporting other colleagues or delivering training out in the field, we’re usually only in one day a week. People realised this and started using our desks as hot desks, and all our equipment gradually failed/vanished and when we DID come in, there wouldn’t be any desks available. So we put up signs. One of the other people came in when a colleague and I were in a meeting elsewhere on site, but set up at our desks, and about half an hour after the signs went up. When we got out of the meeting, he’d torn the sign down that was at the desk where he was sat, put it face down on the desk, then outright denied it when questioned. No one believed his lie, but our manager had a word with him and put up additional signage. He still sits at the desks apart from one day when the signs state are only for our team, but he refuses to speak to any of us.

  70. ID Gal*

    In my first job out of college, which was clerical in nature, I shared a desk with a woman who appeared to be friendly and pleasant. We chatted from time to time and I thought of her as a friend.

    I was accepted into a prestigious university’s creative writing program, which I hoped would help to launch my writing. One of our assignments was to write a diary from the point of view of our protagonist. (Can you see where this is headed?) My co-worker found my “diary” and thought it was actually my own life chronicle. She then proceeded to tell everyone that I was in love with “Craig”, a fellow colleague although I had “tried to disguise his name as “Greg” in “my” diary. So yes, she told everyone what she had read in “my” diary. The real Craig came to me and was quite upset – he had a live-in girlfriend and was angry that I had let everybody know that I liked him. I think what saved my reputation was that 1) I was genuinely surprised when Craig confronted me and 2) I started laughing hysterically when I realized what this nosy snoop had done.

    I confronted her and told her that she was completely out of line and, oh by the way, you spread gossip about non-existent people.

    I was too young to realize that people were actually repulsed by the idea of her reading, anyone’s diary, whether it was fake or not. Her likability quotient dropped quite a bit after that.

    I still do creative writing, I still think that was a great exercise, and it still makes me laugh!

  71. Not on board*

    My husband’s office expects them to be in office M-W so when he takes a day off he tries to make it a Monday. There are claimed and unclaimed desks and the one he claimed is at the back with his back to the wall and a window to his side.

    A manager came in and decided to use his desk while he was off despite there being a completely unused desk in front of her. She completely re-arranged everything on the desk, monitor locations, etc. and then made off with his mouse which he purchased with his own money because the mice they give them is garbage. It was by accident, but still.

    He informed his own boss that if it happened again he would complain to HR and it hasn’t happened since. He has no problem with someone using his desk but for crying out loud, put things back to where they were. He know locks everything in the desk drawer.

  72. Need a Good Name*

    I worked in an Open Office environment that wasn’t “hot desking” but people often sat at your desk if you were away from it for a length of time. no big deal. Once someone walked up to my area and saw me stand up – she asked me if I was leaving and I said I was going to a meeting. She asked, “can i sit there?” and I said, “sure”. I grabbed my laptop last and she looked aghast and said, “Where are you going with that?” I said, “to my meeting”. She angrily said, “but I need it!” I smiled and said I did too (these were assigned laptops) and she asked what she was supposed to do. I said I didn’t know.

    1. Box of Kittens*

      I need to know where her laptop was?? Did she forget it and just hope she could nab one from someone else?? How bizarre

      1. Armchair analyst*

        I have always been warned about “bad actors” trying to gain access to offices to physically steal data (or hardware!) but I have never really heard of it before! Wow is right

        1. JustaTech*

          My spouse had this happen when they worked at a startup, but the thief didn’t try to pretend he worked there, he just walked in, grabbed the CEO’s laptop (he had the first office) and ran.
          The running was what got him caught, because instantly everyone noticed the runner and shouted “stop thief” and a random bystander stuck their foot out and tripped him.

          1. Not Australian*

            We had a window-cleaner who lowered a colleague’s laptop out of the window in a bucket to a mate waiting below, then just carried on and cleaned the windows as normal.

  73. Bruce*

    One funny scene in the movie Brazil is when the protagonist goes to his new office and finds that the desk is shared with the next office over through a hole in the wall… and his desk mate keeps yanking it over to his side to get more desk space! This leads to a battle of them yanking the desk violently back and forth…

  74. former medical assistant*

    In my early/mid 20s I was a medical assistant at a super toxic orthopedic surgery private practice in a bougie area. There was so much wrong with it that I won’t go into, but the shared desk space was insane. There were 5 doctors but only 3 pods for seeing patients, which meant that during the times all 3 pods were in use, the 2 assistants whose docs were in surgery had to make do with whatever computer space was available. There was a conference room we generally used, but if the doctors decided they needed it, we got the boot.

    On one such day, there was a meeting in the conference room and the only work space available was at the front desk (I honestly don’t know why they wanted any of the back office staff to work there, as we were making calls that shared PHI, and patients in the waiting room could easily see our computer screens, but if it was the only thing available we were told we had to). I, in a moment of less than professional behavior, was scrolling on my phone while making calls, and the office manager came over, YELLED AT ME, HIT ME, AND STOLE MY CHAIR, saying they needed it for the meeting. This was all in plain view of a full waiting room, and her yelling was captured on the voicemail of the patient I was calling. I had to work standing up for the rest of the day.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      I feel like whether or not you can tolerate any yelling at all in the workplace may be up to the individual, but anyone in the office physically assaulting you is a pretty good universal red line for “will not tolerate for even 15 seconds more”.

  75. CJ Cregg*

    Back when I worked on the assignment desk at a tv station, we had a long desk with two computers. The computers were shared but we were creatures of habit and sat in the same spots. The person on another shift who shared the computer with me was a huge slob. They had been there for several years before me and considered that “their desk” and took over all the drawers and shared spaces. I’m talking piles of old papers from a decade prior that did not need to be saved, open or leaking packets of condiments from takeout places. Everything was gross and sticky. I would come in the next day after their shift and have to wipe everything down because there would be spills or food messes everywhere. Eventually I cleaned out a drawer for myself (and let them know I was doing so). I kept a few non-perishable snacks in there and quickly realized that labeling them with my name meant nothing because they would eat my snacks. I don’t have a problem sharing, but at least ask first or replace what you ate. Finally, this person went on an extended leave of absence and one day, after months of them not being there, I snapped and spent the morning deep cleaning the entire desk. The entire newsroom stayed out of my way that morning because they knew how gross the desk had been previously

  76. Stella70*

    I worked as a 911 emergency dispatcher. The set-up was that two of us shared the dispatch center; one worked the “hot” desk for four hours (first contact with callers and emergency services), and the second person was backup. After four hours, we would switch positions.

    My partner had an oddball palate and the worst and most frequent meal was spaghetti with red sauce, topped with her pièce de résistance – a two-inch layer of white cheddar popcorn. Once she plated her little popcorn/pasta mountain she would stir it with an energy coveted by tornadoes. Spots of sauce would fly through the air, followed closely behind by cheddar dust, which is stickier than a Post-It note.

    She was sensitive to criticism of any kind, so asking her to make less of a mess made the situation worse. Our microphones, headsets, pens, and paperwork all became canvases for her abstract food art. If my sleeves weren’t stained with sauce droplets, my fingers would get sticky from the equipment we shared. The only “out” I ever found was treating her to lunch, which quickly became quite frequent, and now – with the gift of hindsight – I wonder if she spotted my neatnik ways and simply devised an evil pasta plan to score free meals.

    It was worth it.

  77. Heather*

    At my first job, post grad school, I worked as a newspaper librarian. I had a desk in the library next to the copier.
    Newspapers are a 24/7 thing so there were always people working overnight who needed to look up stuff.
    Every morning I came in to the remains of one of the overnight folk’s dinners sitting (and stinking) on my desk, along with discarded notes, copies, and other papers.
    So, before I started work, I had to clean it all up.
    I was young and it was my first real job–it never occurred to me to say anything (though I did put a note on my desk that had no effect whatsoever).

  78. Delayed Sleep Phaser*

    I interviewed at a fast growing manufacturing company for an Accounts Payable position. The vibes were fine, it was kind of an exciting start up! And then I got to meet the team I’d become a part of.

    Six people were crammed into one smallish office. They each had their own desk, but those desks were packed into the space like sardines. You could probably touch everyone else without getting up.

    The prospect of zero personal space was enough to make my young, naive self pause, but my mind was made up after I asked “what do you like about working here?”

    … crickets.

    Shocking.

  79. A lot of emotion*

    Not a desk but for months I shared an office with a woman with my same program manager job and also a woman with a Ph.D. Who helped write grants and draft policies to drive the market for our program. I mention her Ph.D. Because she was so so so smart and so dedicated – she would stay late and work through lunch and draft these papers with big scientific words and definitions and measurements.

    Then the paper would be due, and she would go to finalize the text with Microsoft Word. And the formatting would be all messed up and so hard to fix and such a struggle and she’s talking and thinking out loud and asking for help but won’t let us near it and she’s so upset and she would burst into tears. A lot of tears and crying.

    I worked there about 2 years and this happened at least 3 times. The papers always got fixed.

  80. Bookworm*

    Much milder version but I was an intern years ago and the intern desk was overrun with paperwork, forcing myself and the other intern to constantly find a free desk elsewhere in the building. At first this was mostly not a big deal but it was a hassle to find spaces and it was always a gamble because sometimes it was something like borrowing a conference room until a meeting time happened.

    A few weeks in I borrowed a space and someone higher up repeatedly asked me if I knew a meeting was scheduled later that afternoon (it was morning when I sat there). I explained repeatedly that I had no place to go as we had no assigned seating and if she knew of a space. Then she had an admin do the same routine (and he was very embarrassed about it).

    When I left for lunch I made sure to take everything with me since I Had A Feeling and sure enough, it was blocked off when I came back. I rolled my eyes and I think went home after that? (Years ago.) I quit either not long after or even that same day (unpaid, boring internship where I was free labor with no upside for me). Pissy woman was still working there last I checked years ago (forgot her name now)

  81. Head Sheep Counter*

    My first not retail job that I hoped would lead to better and better things was for a guy as his dogsbody doing all the random things like data entry, meeting scheduling or whatever needed doing. Unfortunately, the space he had for me to work was his work station in the middle of his residential loft (no walls except the bathroom). Why I didn’t run away, I’ll never be able to explain. Initially, it was cluttered but fine. He’d be elsewhere or set up an additional workspace that he’d do whatever on. But… time elapsed and perhaps his mental health elapsed… so clutter became cat poop and dangerous paths through garbage… and he’d be still in his bed when I got there (recall the lack of walls). I still didn’t run away. I’m guessing that I was at this point a crab in a pot. Eventually, he struck a deal with another company and lo we moved to actual offices. Oddly, I got in trouble for not having good professional boundaries (I’d tell folks who called in for him that he hadn’t yet shown up for work). I am still bitter about it.

  82. Out of Storage*

    Back when I was still in grad school, I was working for a museum part-time. My desk was in a good location, but since space was at a premium, so I had to share it with a rotating cast of interns and volunteers. It was never a problem until my boss hired a short-term contractor. Let’s call her Marsha. Marsha had worked for my boss before and the desk I was at was HER desk. Never mind the fact that I had been there both longer and more recently. Petty stuff, I could deal with. But we had to arrange which days we were in, so we wouldn’t overlap. Marsha kept saying how her schedule was open and she could come in whenever. I was entering into my final semester of grad school. Between classes and my program-required internship, I could only come in Mondays and Wednesdays. And yet, every Monday morning, there she was at my desk. Usually Wednesdays too. She was buddies with the intern we had that semester and so I think she wanted to be in when that girl was in. Fortunately, I had access to the computer in the collection storage room, so I had a backup work space. But that computer had been meant for cataloging purposes only and (as any museum person will tell you) since it was was in the storage room, I couldn’t bring in any food or drink other than water. (As the semester dragged on, the curators did look the other way at my afternoon bottle of cola, since I kept the lid screwed on tightly between sips and clearly needed the sugar and caffeine.) Marsha wasn’t allowed in the storage room, so I would still have to move there on days I beat her to the office. I didn’t complain, but man I was annoyed at the whole situation. A few weeks before the semester ended, my boss came into the storage area and thanked me for my patience and how I was handling everything. He promised that things were going to change very soon. And they did. The semester ended. I graduated and my hours were increased to full time. The intern left. My boss somehow managed to find a way to squeeze in an additional workstation and… he then permanently assigned Marsha to the former intern’s desk. As a lovely graduation gift, the coveted shared desk was now MINE!

  83. Lady Ann*

    Several jobs ago I had an assigned office but was only using it three days a week. I was informed someone else had been assigned to use my office on the days I wasn’t there, which was totally fine with me. Until I went in to find my decorations taken off the walls and put into the closet, my entire desk organizer swept into the trash can (with all my pens, paperclips, and change for the vending machine in it), and an art project from a client of mine – a literal disabled child – crushed and also in the garbage can. I was livid. I left the other person a voice mail – trying to be calm and professional, but I know my voice was shaking in anger – stating I was the other person utilizing that office and I didn’t appreciate her trashing my belongings, and also now I had to explain to my client why her art project was destroyed. I never heard back, most likely because she quit the next week. I really wish I had gotten to talk to her and hear her reasoning.

  84. Scary MoFo*

    I am currently living through a desk sharing situation where we both need to work some of the same hours. This requires us to sit on opposite sides of the same desk with laptops. No one can use the monitors for fear of it being “unfair.” That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. Not my setup luckily, but nearby, multiple times per day a neighboring coworker will make or answer very private personal calls literally sitting at a desk a foot from their desk mate. Topics have been: child support (that wasn’t paid), screaming at people she believes to be stealing from her, and some very NSFW inappropriate comments thrown in (loudly). Meanwhile, her desk mate is attempting to be on work calls. My coworker (her desk mate) has requested a move but is currently stuck there with her 2 days a week.

    1. Lepi*

      In my current role I share an office. It was designed for one person; but the hospital had to put an elevator through our other office and the solution was to squeeze 2 desks into the one remaining office.

      The person who I was sharing the office with was super messy and I couldn’t stand it. At one the top of his desk was so messy he couldn’t work on it anymore. His solution was to take everything off his desk and pile into banker’s boxes. He placed the boxes on the floor of the office. But since we had so little room, I couldn’t open the drawers of my desk without having him picking up the boxes and moving them to the hallway. But we had to be quick about this because cardboard absolutely wasn’t allowed in the hallway (infection prevention), and he acted like it was an enormous imposition every time he had to move them.

      The thing that drove me up the walls the most was his phone alarms. He was constantly setting series of them on his phone and blaring them at top volume. I hated it most when he would set them and then wander away.

      The worst was when I was running a very important meeting with the chairs of every department that uses the services of my department in the hospital, including the CMO, and his phone wouldn’t stop alarming. He had locked it in a desk drawer and I didn’t have a key. I was furiously sending IMs asking for someone, anyone, to find him now. Eventually someone found him at the hospital’s coffee cart. He was peeved that his break was interrupted!

      He failed his PIP and ended up taking a demotion to work at one of the other hospitals in our health system. My new office mate recently started and is much more organised and considerate!

  85. Still icked out*

    I have a couple:

    One place I worked had the full time day shift and when it got really busy they’d hire a part time evening shift, who would use our desks when we were gone. Overtime was strongly encouraged and some people on the evening shift would come in early and try to kick us out of our desks so they could get more hours. I also had to start locking my (personal) headphones away because the evening shift person would use them (ew) and apparently complained when they were no longer available.

    And then there’s my current job. It’s a lab and there used to be just one cube shared by several people. However, only one person used it. Her constant snacking left the mouse and keyboard both sticky and greasy and the garbage can full of wrappers, and the detritus around the chair got ground into the carpet so badly it had to be replaced. Once the computer got unplugged and the poor IT person sent to solve the sudden issue of the computer not working found one of her candies in the in-floor outlet space. I have my own cube now. I eat lunch at it but you can’t tell, because I clean up after myself like a normal person.

  86. Honor Harrington*

    I was an expensive consultant back in the dot.com days, brought into a medium sized company that was creating early internet shopping software. They had the full dot.com culture, including lots of free food. What they did not have was a lot of space.

    My desk was a laptop sitting on top of a giant case of brown-sugar cinnamon pop tarts in the middle of the breakroom.

    I’m the adaptable sort – at the rate they were paying me, I had to be – so this was fine. The only challenge was that whenever someone wanted a pop tart, I had to lift my laptop and let them into the cardboard case so they could grab some. This generally happened about 7 times per day.

    On the other hand, I ended up with a 13% raise from that assignment, and I got all the pop tarts I could ever want, so I guess it was worth it.

    1. PatM*

      I’m wondering, were other pop-tart flavors available and if so did brown sugar cinnamon have fewer interruptions

      1. mreasy*

        I LOLed at the idea that brown sugar cinnamon was used as a desk due to being the least popular pop tart flavor of many cases of them in the office.

  87. Harpo*

    this is a small story, but after I finished my masters, I considered moving from SmallState University to Bigwig University for a Ph.D. (my advisor was retiring and there was nobody else in my area to work with) when I visited the campus, the grad student who was showing me around brought me to the grad student office – a room filled with so many desks that he had to walk over one person’s desk to get to his. I changed my research focus and stayed SmallStateU, where I had a three person office and a couch.

    1. PatM*

      In my head, there was a set of drawers under the desk pulled out to varying distances to make a staircase to enable him to cross the other desk.

      Also, I wonder what the local fire chief would think about a room so heavily occupied that people needed to clamber over furniture to get in and out.

  88. IrishEm*

    We were doing a deep clean before moving desks. Under my new to-be spot we found … toenail clippings. In an open office, call centre.

    Toe.
    Nail.
    Clippings.

    Even now, five years on I have a full body shudder.

  89. Pdxer*

    I used to work in a medical clinic that used to be an ICU (back in the day of medical bays instead of individual rooms). None of the treatment rooms had doors, just a flimsy curtain and only enough space to accommodate the treatment chairs we used. Because they could all hear each other, it wasn’t uncommon for patients to hold conversations or get into arguments with one another while they were waiting for the doctor. Even after years of complaints, the hospital refuses to change this (Because they’re cheap) because it “fosters an inviting atmosphere”. Fortunately, I now work in a clinic that takes patient privacy more seriously.

  90. LegallyBrunette*

    Picture this: it was April 2020, the early days of Covid-19 lockdowns. Not a lot of health safety information available, besides “stay home.” I was a mandated critical worker, on site every day and managing a small team at a 24/7 response center. We hot desked and did our best to obtain elusive sanitizing wipes to clean between shifts. On one overnight shift, I glanced at the desk next to me to ensure the desk agent wasn’t asleep (again).

    To my great surprise, he was not asleep – instead, he had his index finger buried up his nose to the first knuckle, and was merrily digging for gold! I’m not even sure how I mustered it through my horror, but eventually asked, “In light of the current situation, can you please stop picking your nose and go wash your hands?”

    This was a middle-aged person. He never made eye contact with me again as long as I worked there. And I never again voluntarily sat at a desk I knew he occupied.

  91. Retired State Worker*

    A number of years ago, the state office building that was my agency’s headquarters had a fire. The actual fire was confined to just part of one floor, but it left toxic residue covering every single thing in an office building that typically housed over 1,200 state employees, meaning that everyone had to be relocated for the several months it took to rebuild the burned-out area and to decontaminate the rest of the building.

    Empty and unused workspaces are not plentiful in my state’s government facilities. Since this was long before the pandemic, the PTBs decreed that working from home was absolutely out of the question, although the fact that everyone had desktop computers rather than laptops back then meant that even if WFH had been approved, there wasn’t any realistic way to accomplish it. So the thousand-plus of us who had been headquartered in the damaged building got temporarily relocated to facilities literally all over the state.

    The leadership of one large division (division administrator, deputy administrators, bureau directors, deputy bureau directors, office directors, etc.), each of whom had had their own private office in the damaged building, all got relocated to a single large table in a conference room in the headquarters building of a different agency. There were close to twenty of these muckety-mucks (some of them political appointees), each with maybe a square foot of space on the conference table, trying to work in a maze of computer towers, monitors, cables, keyboards, mice, papers, files – over a SINGLE internet connection because the agency whose conference room it was refused to drop in any additional cabling to the room.

    Things got just a WEE bit tense. Blows were not actually thrown, but there were definitely raised voices and ill-advised comments made.

    Fortunately, one of the relocated division’s networking specialists, who had formerly worked for the other agency and knew the building’s network infrastructure like the back of his hand, snuck in enough cabling to give each of the executives their own internet connection. All against the rules, of course, but better that than having three months of open warfare between a couple dozen senior executives all competing for the bandwidth in a single internet connection. Although they still had to share that conference table!

  92. Fotze*

    I used to work security for a local community college. My youngest coworkers would always be 19/20 and clueless about how to conduct oneself in life, let alone work.
    The internet was BANNED on our computers because of one of these coworkers. He would download and install all kinds of shady mal-ware loaded programs to the computers. Casino games, NSFW themed wallpapers, pokemon card games, flashing widgets, you name it!
    Instead of talking to him, putting him on a PIP, or firing him, we just…all lost our ability to even Google the weather. The overpaid and inept layers of bureaucracy at public institutions has often been awe inspiring, but this took the cake.
    The internet (as far as I know) is still not accessible for security staff years later. Long after coworker was gone, and long after the useless Director that demanded the internet be taken away had left. The idea had been floated to bring it back because 1) people ask you for directions, restaurant recommendations, or even about the weather when you’re in a public facing desk and 2) we had to use our personal phones to get around the issue (with blessings from boss and grandboss) but then we just looked like we weren’t doing our jobs.

  93. Cookie-less*

    The desk I was assigned to as a temp was in a quiet corner directly next to a busy sales area, so it wasnt unheard of for people to wander over to take calls. I kept a few office supplies and snacks out, but my desk was otherwise sparse.

    I came to work one day to discover that not only had someone helped themselves to a packaged cookie I had left the day before, they had also abandoned it halfway – torn wrapper and cookie with two bites out of it in the middle of my desk.

  94. Sunshine on My Shoulders*

    In grad school I used a shared desk in a shared office – it was a situation where all the grad students had a shared office with multiple desks and a couple of shared workstations, in addition to a bunch of public-facing work that they all did somewhere else. There was one desk that had a workstation with the software I had to use for one of my projects. I decided to go to work one evening during a time when I didn’t have a scheduled shift in order to get ahead on a project. I went to the office, unlocked the office door with my key, and found the night security guard, sitting at that desk, using that workstation, to look at what I think was child porn (he closed it pretty fast when I came in but I still saw it).

    He was like “oh just give me a sec gotta delete the browser history dontcha know” [chuckle chuckle], so I stood there shell-shocked while he deleted various things in the cookies, cache, and history, and then he got his walkie talkie and left the office. I was rattled, but had work to do, so I logged in and did it.

    I frequently worked the closing shift, and since college campuses late at night are not always the safest places for skinny young blondes, I was in the habit of asking the closing security guards to walk me to my car. Needless to say I did not ask for a walk to my car that night.

    I reported what I saw to my supervisor the next morning (who was brand new to the job, straight out of school). I know that an investigation happened because the big boss asked me some questions about what I saw, and I know that the security guard got put on some kind of leave because he was gone for a while, but then he came back. Still worked there when I left about half a year later.

    In addition to the horror of what he was actually doing in there is the fact that he was the only security guard in a public building late at night, and instead of doing rounds, he was in the basement, down a hall, behind a locked steel door, contributing to the vile abuse of minors. Yeah, NOT MAKING THINGS SAFER.

  95. Sentra*

    I had someone sit at my desk after I went home. The only reason I knew it was happening was I would come in in the morning, and the armrests of my chair would be set to the lowest position. One time they moved my stuff around, but it was always the armrests.

    A few other people had a similar issue, and some had items damaged. The MO seemed to indicate it was the cleaning staff: stuff was pushed around as if someone was trying to dust and knocked over objects in the process, except one morning a person came in to find dirt all over their desk from a knocked over plant. And why were they adjusting my armrests? Why were they (presumably) sitting at my desk when there was an empty one next to mine and in the surrounding area?

    I finally got so weirded out that I said something to a team lead. She kind of just shrugged it off as something that couldn’t be addressed because it was a wide spread issue, someone had been sitting at even the department head’s desk! Her theory was it was the late night security guard taking a break while doing rounds (which weirded me out even more). I told her my stuff had been moved around, others had personal items damaged, and why was this mystery person sitting at occupied desks and not an empty one if they needed a break?

    Despite brushing me off, I think she did say something to someone in the security and/or cleaning staffs because nobody touched my armrests again, and nobody has had their things moved around or broken since.

  96. WillowSunstar*

    Years and years ago, when I was still in my 20’s, I had a temp job with a shared desk at a large local manufacturing company. The person who shared my desk was a born-again Christian who could talk about nothing other than religion. Even if you tried to bring up the weather or some innocuous something, he made it about religion. At that point in my life, I had pretty much stopped believing in religion and really did not want to sit and debate about it all day, so it was either not talk to him or try and only talk about work, which he made very hard.

    However being very shy and scared I would get somehow penalized for asking (because I’d had some verbally abusive bosses at other companies), waited months and months to dare ask for a separate desk (and only when I knew there were some available). I did finally get my separate desk. But it was several months after that there was no more money for the temp contract anyway.

  97. I'm just here for the cats!!*

    OMG! I have so many stories from my days as a Customer Service call center for a cell company.
    1. When I started I was on the late shift so I started at 2:30pm. The problem was that there weren’t enough open seats yet near my team. People who worked until 2 would be stuck on a later call or doing overtime (they were constantly asking for overtime). So I would have all my stuff and just wondering around the call center for 10 minutes looking for someplace to sit. Then you get yelled at for not sitting with your team, taking to long to log in, etc.

    2. There were people who were “special” that got assigned seating. They did not have any type of accommodations. They were just the Operations Mangers pets. So you weren’t able to use their computer.
    3. The worst part of hot desking, besides the obvious gross desk germs, is the chairs. We had the worst, cheapest chairs imaginable. They would break if someone too heavy sat in them and then never get replaced. But I and a few others had back issues so we got notes from our doctor and got ergonomic desk chairs. We had to put our names on it and they had to be put in a back office because others would take the chair when you weren’t using the desk. People would literally hide the chairs!
    4. Hot desking is so gross. I once had a desk that had someone’s nail clippings. At least that was better than the person who found left over *men’s body fluids* under the desk! :0

  98. HSE Compliance*

    Less of a shared desk, and more of a “assumed to be shared space that really wasn’t”.

    At one plant I worked at, I had a little mini records room connected to my office. (Side note, when I first started, I had to clean out a whole bunch of yoga mats, which I was told the person I replaced used to sleep on under the desk.) I’m in compliance, so indeed, we generated a *lot* of records. This little room had a doorway to my office and a door to the main hallway. Note – no door between my office and this room; just an open doorway. This room was *maybe* 10 feet. As in, you could see me at my desk if you walked into that room. This is important.

    We suddenly had a corporate sales guy in for like a month. He was….a mobile sort. For any meeting, he would be wandering around the main central cube area loudly chattering away into his headset. At some point, the plant manager got annoyed enough to tell him to find an empty office and hang out in it rather than annoy everyone. There were three (3) open offices with doors at the other end of our floor. Less than 100 feet away. Big corner offices. Where does this man go? Into my records room. And every time, he would walk in, yapping away, pace the room a couple times, turn and look at me like he’s never seen a human being before, and then wander off slowly. I started closing the hallway door on the records room, but he would just open it and wander in. I finally started locking it and he walked into the door trying to open it.

  99. Combobulate*

    In my first job out of college as an office admin I shared a cube with Mary who was in the process of getting divorced. She lived with (and shared a bed with?) her spouse. He drank himself to sleep (at home or not) and she took sleeping pills to every night. I think the sleeping pills were in part an excuse to not be able to drive to pick him up from the bar.

    Every day between 11am-12pm she’d call him from our cube to wake him up and yell at him. So much yelling. When I left the job to go to grad school she wrote me a love poem that was maybe also a coming out poem? I wish I’d saved it because with 25 years distance I could find some humor in it now.

  100. Freddy*

    Not me, but a coworker. This was in the days before cell phones. Our office was being renovated and Jane had to temporarily move in & share an office with Fergus. Fergus had the incredibly annoying habit of doing all calls and voicemails on speaker phone. Fergus was senior and Jane was new, so she just grit her teeth and tried to ignore it.
    One day after lunch, Fergus leaned far back in his chair, put feet up on desk, and played back his messages. The first one was from his girlfriend, leaving him a very sexy, racy message. Fergus nearly broke his chair, neck, and back trying to sit bolt upright to turn off the messages. Jane nearly died of acute suppressed laughter. Speaker phone problem solved. Maybe not a horror story after all.

  101. Blue Spoon*

    This is mild compared to everything else here, but my workplace did need to get a set of heavy duty coasters for a shared desk because one guy kept putting so much ice in his water bottle that the condensation would flood normal coasters and leave huge puddles on the desk.

  102. yet another librarian*

    Our former director felt that any desk decor was clutter, and issued an edict that we could only allocate an outlandishly small amount of space on our desks to personal items (e.g., photos or little trinkets) because things were looking too sloppy around the building. Needless to say, staff did not appreciate this kind of micromanagement, and a staff member who had a fairly visible desk cut a piece of paper to the exact measurement that we could devote to personal items (it was smaller than an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper) and put a bunch of toy dinosaurs on it, all crammed together. There were probably fifteen plastic dinosaurs of different sizes sitting on this little piece of paper, and every time I walked past it, I couldn’t help but laugh. Nobody ever said anything to him about it, and it was one of my all-time favorite examples of malicious compliance.

  103. Domanda*

    My toxic shared desk experience was the straw that broke me and inspired me to quit. I had been at a small but well-known organization for only a few months, and by then it was excruciatingly clear that it was an incredibly dysfunctional environment. I should have known when, on my first day, the manager who hired me told me she was quitting. Of the 20 people working there when I started, when I quit after just five months there were only about 9 of the original staff left.

    During all this mess they had brought in a new Executive Director who dealt with the chaos by spending hours of staff meetings coming up with new staff seating plans, which felt like someone doing the dishes while the house was on fire. The new seating plan was also a bit weird because most of us worked at hot desks anyway, so it wasn’t like we had permanent spots. One day I went to lunch, and when I returned my desk was GONE. My computer was on the floor. No one had bothered to say anything to me before I left.

    It made the news when the organization closed down about 2 years later, but I was frankly surprised that it had lasted as long as it did.

  104. SAR*

    I have an assigned desk, but I only work in the office one day a week (Thursdays). The other four days, I work from home. That means my desk is available four days week for use as a hot desk for folks who don’t have an assigned desk.

    One gentleman (“E”) who knows my schedule uses my desk as a hot desk frequently. And apparently runs into just an unfathomable number of technical issues. I have lost track of the number of help desk tickets E has opened for the equipment at my desk. But since it is MY equipment, I am the one who has to field the help desk techs when they attempt to troubleshoot. Help desk techs often drop by on while I’m in the office to troubleshoot the technical issue du jour. We are, strangely, never able to replicate the issues E claims experience.

    Often times, when I close the help desk ticket, nothing else ever comes of it. Occasionally, he’ll re-open the ticket. Once, a help desk tech wrote down very detailed instructions on how to resolve the USER-CAUSED issue E was experiencing at my desk. I left them on the keyboard for E to read the next day. E sent me an IM on Friday telling me he’d thrown the instructions in the trash (???).

    With all the issues he seems to experience using my desk, I’ve often wondered why he doesn’t just hot desk in one of the FIVE other open desks in my cube share. The world may never know.

  105. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    Not quite Hot Desking, but I have an office at our Corporate HQ which is empty a lot of the time, as I am only down there for two weeks every couple months. I literally never know what I am going to find in my office when I come down. Most recently, it was covered in glitter and sequins from the Valentines Day goodie bags they put together for the Team using my office. Anyone who knows Mr. It’s Marie Not Maria knows he has a loathing of glitter that burns hotter than a thousand suns. I had to be very careful to not bring any of that home on my clothes when I came home!

  106. Ialwaysforgetmyname*

    Does office/desk adjacent count? At an old job I would sometimes bike commute 30 miles each way which meant I changed into cycling shorts for the ride home. My boss & I each had separate offices, but the door to hers was through mine. Once, after she had left for the day, I changed into my cycling clothes and somehow managed to not put my underwear into my backpack for the ride home, though my pants and shirt made it (for those not in the know, you don’t wear underwear under cycling shorts).
    The next morning I was beyond horrified to discover that her first sight upon entering our offices was my underwear on the floor.

  107. Raine*

    Back in the late ’90s, the IT division where I worked as a temp admin put all their contract workers in shared cubicles. Unfortunately, the shared cubicle I was given (despite needing to work on confidential employee files) was with another contractor. There was just enough room for one of us to push back her chair at a time, so we always had to tell each other when the other was planning to stand up. We had zero room for visitors, and each of us had enough desk space for a single monitor and a desktop PC with a keyboard and mouse (about four feet). If you moved your mouse, you’d hit the side of the cubicle. She was asked to use a second monitor, so I was told to move so her second monitor could be on my desk, all without anyone knowing where I was supposed to move to, since all the desks were claimed.

  108. HRneedsAdrink*

    This is more of a PSA-
    If you have an HR person/ dept, please have a designated space for them to have private and confidential conversations as well as a place to lock up their files. I have worked HR in too many places that had neither. I know we’re not everyone’s favorite, we don’t generate any income, etc., but I have no doubt the rest of your employees would like their info to remain private.

    At one company, they sent everyone to work remote (yay!), but required 1 day in the office (no problem). So, they downsized the office which now had an ‘open concept’ desk sharing structure with only 2 offices that had doors (besides the CEO’s office). They told us in HR that we could use those offices to conduct interviews, counsel employees, discuss FMLA/ ADA and benefits, etc. Problem was that the SrVPs / C-Suite execs would commandeer those offices as soon as they arrived for the day (even booting some people out who had arrived earlier).

    I would try to conduct all interviews and discussions while at home, but on occasion, an employee might have an emergency or need to discuss something personal at that moment, I would have to get my grand boss to call one of the SrVPs and have them vacate the enclosed office (I tried asking nicely a couple times and was not so nicely told NO). Eye daggers of death were thrown at me weekly. No employees should have to fight/ beg/ plead for a confidential space in which to work. That is all, thank you.

    1. It's Marie - Not Maria*

      THIS! I worked in an open office concept, so we had to have private meetings with employees in glass walled Conference Rooms and Breakout Rooms. Yes, these had doors, but everyone could clearly see who HR was talking too. There needs to be at least one completely private space for HR to hold confidential conversations.

  109. Syfy Geek*

    I had just started at a non-profit around 2006 and was loving everything about it. Except my desk. It was a 1970’s era typing/secretary desk. L shaped, but the long part of the L was long enough enough for my PC, keyboard, and a notepad. I kept my desk phone and a calculator on the short L.

    We were tapped for a BIG HONOR. (and I’m being deliberately more vague than usual). A consultant was brought in to help us maximize this honor. Consultant (Aaron) was fabulous! Loved him to pieces. Donors couldn’t wait to give him money. But Aaron insisted on sharing my tiny desk with me. Because it was So Convenient! Because I was So Much Fun! Because I had the latest amounts from Donors! And this was my life 2-3 days per week for 3 months…

    Did I mention Aaron had his own desk, in his own office, in another building?

    When the Big Honor was over, I bought a desk that looked like a tellers desk- front section that was elbow high and blocked access to my desk from the front and sides.

  110. Green Goose*

    I had a minor one, where I was the bad desk mate but I never figured out why. I was working at a job where we were mostly out in the field doing work but they occasionally needed people to do paid data entry work which I would do for extra money.
    There was a communal office that had desktops, a cup with a few pens and chairs, nothing else. I did data entry one day for a few hours and then went to a team meeting down the hall afterwards. After the meeting ended my boss said (in front of everyone). “Green Goose, please go clean up the office and put it back as it was before you went in there.” I was surprised and a little embarrassed when she said that and thought maybe I had forgotten my sweatshirt, or accidentally dropped something but when I checked the empty office was just as it was. Just a computer (still attached), a chair (not thrown in the middle of the room) and the cup of pens. I stressed about it for a few minutes before asking the boss if everything was okay. She kind of brushed it off and never explained what “mess” I had left. But then a few weeks later she essentially fired me from the data entry work and would not give me an explanation of why. I kept doing the field work but I never figured out what I had done.

  111. Mystery Shorts*

    About a year and a half ago, my company switched from hot-desking to assigning people desks. When I got to my new assigned desk, the last person to book it had left behind a pair of men’s basketball shorts. We work in a business-casual office, so no idea why anyone would need to bring basketball shorts to work. They looked clean, but I wasn’t about to sniff them or anything to be sure. Nobody ever claimed them, and I never found out why they were there. They sat in a corner of my desk for about a month before I eventually moved them to an unoccupied desk I hope that whoever got moved there in the future would have a better idea on how to handle it, and whoever lost their basketball shorts doesn’t miss them too much.

  112. Asking For a Friend*

    Not exactly a shared space, but my coworkers have a habit of coming by my desk to “accidentally” glance at my screen (I’m an EA, so it’s mostly about trying to find out my manager’s calendar details or other information).
    Repositioning my desk or installing privacy screens isn’t an option for the moment, so to handle this, I’ve started keeping an e-book open on one of my screens at all times. It’s called “How to Pretend You Care”, with chapters like “The Fine Art of Nodding”, “Deflecting Unwanted Conversations”, etc. It might help or go quite wrong — in any case, it’s only been a week, so I’ll see what my learning from this will be.

  113. Frodo*

    Many years ago I took a job selling gaming software. This was in the 90s, so it was long before gaming devices. Think CD-ROMS that needed to be inserted in your disk drive every time you wanted play. All sales were done over the phone. There were always a minimum of five sales people available each day, plus a couple of people who worked nights. We had a rotating schedule so we grabbed whatever cubicle was available.

    On my first day of work I took a random desk and everything went fine. 2nd day of work: I was at a different cubicle, and the previous user left an unfinished soda on the desk along with an opened bag of chips and crumbs everywhere. This happened again on Day 3, so I asked a coworker if this was normal. She told me that it was probably Greg, who made a habit of leaving food everywhere and not cleaning up after himself. I asked her if there was a better desk around. She looked at the other cubicles, thought about it, and said, “you can try the cubicle at the end, but that’s the desk Nate uses when he’s here during the night shift, so you’ll probably want to swap out keyboards.” Naturally I asked why, and she said “He likes to try out some of the porn games, which is why he keeps a keyboard protector on the keyboard.”

    There was no Day 4.

    1. Bike Walk Bake Books*

      You have a fine future as a super-short-story writer à la O. Henry. Love the last line–chef’s kiss.

  114. Ann Onymous*

    I spent a few months at work sitting in a conference room that had been turned into a “collaboration space”. There were 6 of us sitting 3 to a side at the large conference table and another 4 to 6 people at small desks around the perimeter of the room. The guy who sat directly across the conference table from me had tons and tons of clutter – pay stubs, food wrappers, notebooks, you name it – and because there was no physical barrier between his space and mine, his stuff would creep into my space both across the top of the table and the floor underneath. The room was also ventilated like a conference room that would be occupied for an hour or two at a time, not a space where 12 people and their computers would sit all day, so it was always stuffy. Another occupant of this space was an extreme cheapskate whose lunch for several days consisted primarily of broccoli because Walmart had a really good sale on it. Being trapped in an under-ventilated space with someone else’s broccoli farts should be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

  115. Lucy P*

    We use the storage space at our reception desk for items that all of the admin team needs access to: facility keys, postage stamps, batteries, the good pair of scissors that can actually cut, labels for various purposes. No drawer or cabinet is off limits to the admin team.

    When I was the receptionist, I never gave it another thought. Years later when I got my own private office space, I felt like I had won the lottery since I could designate one drawer for all of my personal stuff.

  116. Turtle Dove*

    If crazy things in open-plan workspaces count, my colleague Carl got an eyeful a few times that might have scarred him for life. In our corporate IT department, everyone had a clear view of their teammates’ computer monitors after all the cube walls were taken down and desks were shoved close together. Carl often noticed one female colleague shopping for lingerie, her screen full of lace and bare skin. He repeatedly saw a different, senior female colleague reveal her butt crack (from the back view) and chest cleavage (from the front view) as she bent over male colleagues’ desks to give instructions. As far as I know, Carl and the other men didn’t report anything to management or HR. I’m glad to be out of that very weird place.

  117. Moose*

    At my first internship, there was no assigned space for interns–or any open space at all, not even a break room. The exec assistant kept the ancient intern laptop in her desk drawer, and every day I would pick it up, then roam the halls looking for an empty cubical/office belonging to whoever was on vacation, working from home, or out sick, and that would be my desk for the day. I felt SUPER WEIRD doing this and asked the assistant multiple times if there was another option, and she told me it was fine and everyone was informed of the situation. (Our boss was fully remote and knew nothing about the office space.)

    I started to doubt that people expected a random intern to be in their space based on what they were willing to leave out on their desks. Valentine’s cards with not exactly SFW messages pinned open on their corkboards, right at eyeline…several empty bottles of wine and a corkscrew, which I can only hope was left over from an after-hours holiday party, although it was like April…other old food or drink trash that was just gross…DIVORCE PAPERWORK, just chilling above their keyboard…I tried not to snoop but people’s stuff was just THERE, all the time. After 4-5 months and my repeated requests they set up a card table and folding chair in the corner the cube space. Much less weird and I could finally have my own stapler!

  118. Nat20*

    This was at a university. In the department I worked for, the faculty were all in either one- or two-person private offices. I was just an adjunct instructor (i.e. on a one-semester-long contract with the possibility, but no guarantee, of rehire each semester), so I didn’t officially get an office of my own, but they stuck me in one of the smaller one-person offices that normally belonged to a professor who was on sabbatical that year. Lucky break! The fall was blissful.

    I was rehired for the spring, when they shoved a second desk in there for another last-minute adjunct hire. The office went from cozy to cramped overnight. There was only the absolute bare minimum of space for us both to sit at a 90° angle from each other without our chairs touching. And we couldn’t rearrange; half the room was still filled with bookshelves and equipment belonging to the actual professor who had this office.

    Fine, whatever. But the woman they crammed in with me was the most negative person I’d met in the department. She would constantly put down her students & complain about their work to me, and would not stop as long as I was in the room. She was teaching some “remedial”/fundamental-skills courses and I swear she thought all her students were idiots. She actually called them — her 19 y/o freshmen who were literally in her class because they needed extra help and patience — insulting names to me whenever they got low scores or struggled to grasp a concept. (Not slurs or anything, but a milder one I remember was “knuckleheads”, and not meant endearingly.) I mean it’s one thing to be frustrated by students missing a lot of class or cheating or something, but she was always exasperated that they didn’t already know the things they were in her class to learn. And she didn’t just want to vent, she wanted conversation and advice, so while I tried not to engage much, I couldn’t just tune her out.

    So not only did I have to use a borrowed one-desk-sized office with two desks, the woman I had to work on top of was an insistent chatterbox and a crappy teacher who made me angry for her students, and I was a lowly adjunct with no standing to complain. I tried making it clear to her that I could talk occassionally but needed to focus and couldn’t spend all my office time talking, but it just did not go through.

    I surreptitiously found out her schedule and started only working in the office on days I knew she wasn’t, and otherwise working at home or elsewhere on campus. But I got rehired again the following year and I’m pretty sure she didn’t (and I got moved to a much better office), so there’s that.

  119. earlthesachem*

    Kind of an anti-horror story.

    In the mid-90s I transferred within a large marketing company to a new team that was being formed to support a different account than I had been working for. Our permanent workspace wasn’t ready, so a dozen or so of us spent a few months working cheek-by-jowl in a smallish conference room. Picture a half dozen banquet style tables each with two gigantic 90s computers and monitors ringing the room with another couple in the center. It was cozy and ripe for issues.

    And we actually all got along extremely well! The enforced closeness really brought us together even after we moved into the permanent space with the rest of the account. Since most of us were in our mid-20s we ended up doing things like joining the company bowling league (I set the record for low score in a game) and playing pickup softball games against other departments full of 20-somethings. And when a couple of us took over the account’s department newsletter we discovered that humor increases readership and engagement (who knew rutabagels could be a viable concept for a new food?)

    The closest thing we had to a horror story was one guy’s screensaver. It was a somewhat unsettling caricature of Madonna in her burlesque cone bra phase dancing around the screen to music. Loud music. And it was password locked so we couldn’t go in and turn the speakers down. It’s long enough ago that I don’t remember the song anymore, but the dancing image still haunts me.

    1. Bruce*

      Back around 1992 I worked for a year at a big tech company, my manager was sort of a rabble rouser and to give him something to do he was assigned a project to fix a problem, he brought me in as the chip design lead. He had a program running on his workstation that would play sound clips when he got emails, and they varied based on who the sender was. Most were clips from The Simpsons, I think for his manager it played a clip of Homer saying “Now Bart…” and for a lot of people it played Bart saying a rude word. He went away on vacation for a week leaving his office door open, and all day I was hearing Homer and Bart sounds from his workstation. I think his manager found out about it too. He moved on before I did, but not by much,… His replacement was a decent guy but the whole company had issues…

  120. Anon today*

    Shared desk in a radio station.
    I worked the night shift and shared with the morning guy. He was a former smoker and constantly coughed up gunk which he spit into a disposable cup. Sometimes he forgot to take the spit cup with him when he left, which is as gross as it sounds.

    He was annoyed by my left handedness, since we shared a filing drawer in the desk. I would file paperwork “upside down” (with the top pointing left), which he would fix by putting it the “right” way (top pointing right). It was because I would grab a piece of paper with my left hand to file and he would grab paper with his right hand to file.

    We were each convinced we were correct on that one.

  121. JustaTech*

    It was me, I was the problem.
    Though in fairness, it only happened once, I apologized immediately afterwards and again the next day with cupcakes.

    When I started my job we were crammed into our building like sardines – there was barely room to turn around in the labs and I shared a cube with two other people. The building was downtown, so there wasn’t a parking lot or anywhere outside it would be sensible to try and take a phone call of more than 2 minutes.

    I was also just about to get married, so one day I had what was scheduled to be a 15-20 minute call with a lawyer to go over my prenup. The only place to take this call was at my desk. (There was a “phone booth” that was literally smaller than a casket and glass, so not even slightly soundproof, and between the elevators, so you were on display for everyone.)

    The phone call with the lawyer did not go as I expected, and ended up being more like and hour and I cried repeatedly. I felt terrible that my (recently divorced) coworker and my (very young) new coworker had to listen to me, but there was literally no where else I could go.

    I apologized profusely, they forgave me, and I’ve been happily married since.

    Now if I had a similar call it wouldn’t matter that my office is hilariously not sound proof (stupid glass walls) because there is hardly anyone left to hear me!

  122. Pierrotlunaire0*

    I was a branch manager at the DMV in training. It was my second time in this one office filling in for the regular manager who was out sick. On this occasion, the schedule for the upcoming pay period had to be posted by the end of the day (unionized staff – it HAD to be posted). The district manager had me look through the manager’s desk to see if she had started one or if there were any templates (No, because the regular manager was a disorganized mess). With the help of the district manager over the phone, I was able to cobble one together. However, I ended up speaking to the district manager when I found a rather negative evaluation of my first time in the office. (1) It was just sitting on the desk where any staff or even the cleaning staff could have read it; (2) It was rather presumptuous for her to criticize my organizational skills considering the filthy mare’s nest her office was in. The district manager assured me she would speak to the manager upon her return, and knowing the district manager, I am certain she did.

  123. Dhaskoi*

    I used to work in a small satellite office that was semi open plan and I was often the only person physically in the office. One of my colleagues, a generally lovely person, would bring her reasonably well behaved small dog into the office and sometimes left him there while she ran (work) errands. This was only a problem once, when her dog lay down in front of the only door out of the office and began to enthusiastically lick his privates for 10 minutes straight. I focused intensely on my work and never, ever told her about it.

  124. Nova5155*

    At former job, 95% of the computers were shared because most people only needed them to do their timesheet. I, however, did a lot of admin, technical writing, and training development, but I couldn’t have my own computer because none of this was technically part of my job description. (I know, I know! Lots to unpack about that job!) So there were were two issues with this.
    1. If you stepped away without saving work, your computer would eventually lock. If someone else logged onto their own account, everything unsaved would disappear. This was eventually fixed so that work wasn’t lost because we had a lot of a**holes who would log on knowing you were in the middle of something. These employees came in and crossed over with the smaller day crew for about an hour, so I would still have an hour to work, and this tended to also be my crossover time with most of management, which would pull me away from the computer. So the night crew knew I was finishing up and would be leaving imminently, but they “just had to do their timesheet.”
    2. We were allowed to use the shared computers to entertain ourselves on breaks–FB, eBay, movies, whatever. The above group of a**holes tended to be from the night shift, and due to the structure of work they had a long dinner break about two hours into their shift. (See above about not being able to wait to do their timesheets.) They would all sit and eat, drink, and be merry around the computers and leave food messes, etc, for someone else to clean up. One time the etc was literal boogers wiped on the keyboard! Also this computer space was technically a loading dock, so it was filthy all the time. Because it was nobody’s space, nobody cleaned it. I did a deep-clean once, and my lead reported that I had “wasted half a day.”
    Fun times!

  125. Sparrow*

    This made me think of a story I have that is similar to the prompt but not quite suited for it—rather than taking place at a shared desk, it takes place in a coworking space. Thinking about this story has made me suddenly really, really want to see an AAM stories prompt like this that calls for people to submit their wildest stories from working in a coworking space!

  126. Jo*

    This was probably about 30 years ago. But I worked in the office of a metal salvage yard. It was a very small office, and the desks were close together with no kinds of dividers. Every couple of months, the manager would take his socks and shoes off, prop his feet on the desk, and clip his toe nails. Right there out in the open for everyone to watch. Thankfully I did not work there for long.

  127. Harriet Vane’s Rucksack*

    My department’s suite of offices were being renovated last summer and fall, and while it was happening, our team of about 20 people were spread all over our building in various departments where there was room for us. I shared a small office with two of our student employees. Everything was fine until I opened the middle drawer of the desk I was temporarily using to find pens, sticky notes, a couple of USB drives … and at least two dozen VERY used foam earplugs. They were covered with earwax. Some of them were sticking together in clumps, or sticking to the pens and other ephemera. I quietly closed the drawer, never opened it again, and repeatedly washed off the rest of my work surfaces with antibacterial wipes. Every time I thought of what was in that drawer, I would shudder a little. Like, WHY?!!

  128. Chaos Farmer*

    At one temp assignment, there was drink sitting in the middle of the desk when I got there. It turned out that the receptionist working there that morning had gone home sick. I was grossed out to be sitting in the chair they’d just been in, touching the same phone and keyboard. I definitely washed my hands after that, but I didn’t have access to cleaning supplies.
    At another temp job, we’d each have to find a desk for the day (and our tasks might depend on which desk we ended up at). The best temporary desk had two monitors and a printer, but was in a busy hallway. Another desk was in a quiet corner, but had just a laptop- no phone, printer, or enough light. I’m no good at touch typing, so I struggled with one setup that had an old keyboard with the letters worn off. At least everyone I worked with there was friendly and seemed to have a good attitude about moving around to different spots.

  129. Wolf*

    Around 2018, my then-employer quietly deleted me from the shared desk seating plan. Then told me it was nothing to worry about, just a shuffling of the plan, and I’d get another assigned desk.

    A few days later, they told me my job was cut.

  130. MissAgatha*

    I worked in a call center with shared desks. I had two coworkers who were good buddies and were always joking around with each other. One morning I came in and one of these people was hovering at the door waiting to talk to me, something that had never happened before. She nervously asked me not to read the email that I had waiting in my inbox, which of course I did immediately. Somebody had messed with the computer settings at “her” desk, and when she angrily asked around they told her that I was the last one sitting there, prompting an … irate email. After sending the email, she found out that it had actually been her work buddy messing with her.

  131. AnnonChair*

    Perhaps a little late, but…

    I need a specific type of chair, a specific keyboard, and a raised desk or I’m in horrific pain by about half an hour into the working day. My office decided it wanted to do hotdesking which naturally meant identical desks, chairs, equipment etc for everybody- which caused my little heart to sink.

    The battle raged for three months and in the end the CEO got involved, mostly to tell the objectors that this was a stupid fight to have over a chair they had already bought, a keyboard that would otherwise be thrown away, and four riser blocks that cost maybe £15.

    I went in 3 days a week as per policy, and kept on having to boot people out of my desk because they wanted to sit at a raised desk with a “fancy” (10 year old) chair. Some of them, particularly the ones from the international office that had forced this policy on us, would get genuinely nasty and more than once I’d end up in tears over the humiliation of having to fight over and over to not be in pain. A couple of repeat offenders and the people who had objected to my accommodations would walk behind me multiple times a day and would inevitably walk into the chair or kick it.

    It was the kind of workplace where the mundane nastiness got to be normal; eventually I left, and I was so grateful and relieved not to have to carry on that fight any more!

    1. I Have RBF*

      That is not acceptable. I wonder if it could legally be considered a hostile workplace – having to fight, and be humiliated, whenever you were in for your accommodations, plus having your chair walked in to or kicked.

      I definitely wish them the day they deserve.

  132. Rina*

    I am very attached to a particular brand of lip balm and use it frequently throughout the day. I was at a shared desk and grabbed my lip balm off the desk, applied it, and put it back on the desk. Maybe 15 minutes later, I realized with great horror that MY LIP BALM WAS IN MY POCKET. I HAD USED SOMEONE ELSE’S LIP BALM.

  133. Laura*

    Years ago I worked in a hot desking call centre, I started noticing a horrible smell around one of the desks but no one else seemed to notice it until a hot day when it became VERY noticeable. I dug around in the drawers under the desk which were full of files/paper and found a carrier bag full of… chunky brown liquid. From what we could see when throwing it away, it had once been someone’s groceries (we think fruit and bread) but no one owned up to it and we suspect it was a temp who had left suddenly and forgot to take her shopping home.

    (Yes I did thoroughly bleach the drawers!)

  134. Gretchen*

    When I was a graduate student, I had a part-time job doing data entry in a microbiology lab at my university. One day, I showed up to work, and my computer was in tiny pieces all over my office. You see, this lab did most of its imaging of microtubules with computers, and someone decided they needed mine–or, at least, part of it. I spent several minutes wandering up and down the hallways trying to figure out if my database was still intact on someone else’s computer (it was) and if I had a place to work for the day. No, I did not.

  135. ITGalInTexas*

    Nothing crazy BUT
    1.) Once while sitting at a local site in the cattle corral (shared desks) I noted that folks were not throwing away trash. As in dumping lunch scraps into the storage for personal items, or leaving orange peels strewn across the desks. I investigated and found the person responsible for managing the area and let them know. I was asked for specifics, which I provided. I was then asked for the names of the people?? As in, please walk up to the messy folks and ask their name and report back. I told her that she could walk into the site and see what I was talking about. She informed me that she sat elsewhere and couldn’t visit the site…and provided me with printable signs to place on messy desks as I saw necessary. I declined this opportunity.

    2.) I wandered into the shared desk area and sat at an empty seat. The woman across from me (who had decorated the non assigned space with houseplants) immediately stood up and asked what I was doing. She informed me that I was sitting in Jerome’s seat.
    Please note the seats are not assigned and you have to reserve a space each day.
    I asked if he was here today. No he is not. Ok then I’m going to sit here. She then pointed to another seat and informed me no one sits there and I should move. I did not. And attended my thirty minute meeting via phone, while she gave me the evil eye from her houseplant nest.

  136. Nightengale*

    It wasn’t too horrible because we made it work, but it could have been much worse

    I started a new job as a doctor and was moved into a work room with 3 desks. Another doctor, a nurse practitioner and a social worker used those desks. The social worker and I shared a desk for awhile. Mostly I would pull the desk phone onto the floor and curl up there with my laptop, leaving her the rest of the desk and the chair. Fortunately I like sitting on the floor. Eventually COVID hit and we all worked from home for awhile and then she moved to an new office and some other staff were shuffled around.

  137. mollyy*

    A very good friend of mine shared a desk with a coworker during a renovation period. In the first week, the coworker trimmed her nails and left the clippings all over the keyboard.

  138. JR*

    I worked for an org that had grown out of its space. Conference rooms and hallways had been converted into work spaces. The break room had been converted to a conference rooms. Managers had resorted to using the balconies and some “man trap” spaces as “private” locations to have coaching conversations. (They were building a new space, but – surprise, surprise – the construction was running behind schedule.)
    I was one of their few hybrid employees. I arrived to work one day to find someone using my desk. (We used hot desking in some parts of the organization, but I supposedly had a dedicated desk.) When I asked her, she informed me that she had been assigned this desk permanently (5 days a week). Not only had I not been informed, my boss did not know this either.
    I asked where I should work and was told to “find a spot”. In the hot desking portion of the office, there were regularly employees that were using whoever was currently at lunch’s desk. And the conference rooms stayed full. So find a spot, literally was meant to mean, find a corner where there is maybe an electrical outlet. I edited videos and designed eLearning for them. They were shocked to discover that I wanted a full work station, including a monitor, to do my job. They thought that because I was remote three days a week, I was working on my laptop screen and didn’t use a desk or printer or anything else.
    I asked for permission to work remotely full time until the space and workspace issue was resolved. That was denied. For the next month, until my manager was able to resolve the attendance requirement, I often “worked” with my laptop on my lap in a random chair located in a walkway near a power outlet. I did not get much work done on my mandatory in-office days.

  139. Literary Dragons*

    It wasn’t a shared desk, but back when I worked retail we had a stack of papers at each register for wrapping glasses other breakables. We had one coworker who was very upset that she didn’t get a promotion that she felt she was entitled to. (No one told her she was in the running or anything, she just assumed she would get it.) She started to leave messages written on the papers about how she hated the store and how terrible management was. The morning crew did not love coming in to things like that at the registers.

  140. Not a Real Green Dress*

    I worked in a call center as in a supervisory type position. The job I was in had two positions, one who worked day shift and one who worked second shift. We overlapped by about an hour or so. I was the day shift person.
    The two of us had an office that was very large for our position and we shared it. We basically used it to keep our personal items in because we were mostly on the floor.
    At one point we find out we’re getting a new office which was even bigger and nicer. The day we were allowed to move in, I put my stuff in it but was as usual mostly working on the floor. My counterpart comes in the afternoon.
    I see her go over to this area we called the “graveyard” which was an area where we kept all the broken office equipment. She is pushing a desk, chair, and carrying a monitor, tower, etc. into the new office. So I go in and ask what’s going on. The original desk is in the middle of the room and now there’s a new desk with a chair, computer and phone pushed against the wall. She says to me “Oh I was getting some stuff for you”. I told her I was fine with sharing (we hardly used the stuff) and she insisted she wouldn’t share and I had to use the stuff she salvaged. I said if anyone was using the salvaged stuff it was her. (I should mention that in addition to it being her idea, she was also much much newer than me).
    Eventually she gave up on the two desks idea (I think because she couldn’t get any of the salvaged electronics to work) so she decided sharing was fine. But one day I came in to find she has absolutely raised the supply closet and taken at least one of everything including a compass and a protractor (things we would never use in a million years) and that on every single on she had put a post it note and written “Abby’s protractor” or whatever.

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